Suicides at the FoxConn plant at Longhua in China

There has been much written about the recent suicides at the FoxConn manufacturing plant in Longhua in China. FoxConn is one of the largest electronics companies in the world, making everything from iPods, iPads, iPhones, the Nintendo Wii, Microsoft Xbox 360s, and the Playstation 3.

Conditions on the complex sound far from ideal (see this article from the Shenzen Post).

Apparently, the Longhua site houses 300,000 - 400,000 people and there have been 16 suicide attempts (12 deaths), and 20 people have been stopped before they could attempt suicide. If we round up the timescale to six months, that means there will be 20-30 deaths in one year due to suicide at the plant.

The company have, in the last few weeks, increased wages and attempted to improve conditions on the site. However, what would be the expected number of suicides in such a population?

It's difficult to know what the suicide rate for a similar population in China is, so we will have to extrapolate from UK figures.

1. The age-standardised suicide rate (male and female) is approximately 15 per 100,000 people per year. More details can be found on the ONS website.
2. This means that 15 people will die by suicide for every 100,000 people each year.
3. In a population of 300,000, there will be 15x3=45 suicides.
4. In a six-month period, you would expect there to be 20-25 suicides in 300,000 people.

This means that even though any suicides are troubling and tragic, the number seen at the Longhua plant is slightly less than what one would expect to see by chance alone. Given that the Longhua employees are younger, the expected rate would be even higher than the population rate.

This fact has been explained by Steve Jobs in the last week. If the concern generated improves conditions for workers producing expensive technology then this can only be a good thing, but chance alone would have produced the same rate.