Last Monday (2 January 2012), more than three hundred employees at a Foxconn Xbox manufacturing plant in Wuhan, China threatened to chuck themselves off the building after a wage dispute went bad.
I don’t get to write sentences like that every day.
According to Taiwanese news site Want China Times, the factory workers had applied for a wage increase, and been told to quit with compensation or go on working at the same wage.
Most of the employees reportedly opted to quit, but the company cancelled the deal and refused to pay up.
Foxconn production line
So the workers responded as any reasonable, sane workforce would – by lining themselves up on the rooftop, and threatening to jump off into the eternal abyss.
The mayor of the town was called in and managed to talk them down later the same night.
This is not the first time Foxconn has been in the news about this kind of stuff – back in mid-2010, eighteen employees attempted suicide, resulting in fourteen deaths and prompting the company to put up suicide-prevention netting around its buildings.
Foxconn suicide prevention netting
Shortly afterwards, at a Foxxconn Factory in India, 250 workers were hospitalised after a pesticide spraying gone awry.
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That must make the office party pretty awkward.