Patrick Mattimore, a fellow at the Institute for Analytic Journalism, recently published the following article on China’s People’s Daily Online, headlined: Media badly misplaying Foxconn suicides.

Taiwanese-owned Foxconn has had seven suicides this year. That sounds like a lot, but the firm has an estimated 800,000 workers, more than 300,000 of them at a single plant in Shenzhen.

Although exact figures are hard to come by, even the most conservative estimate for China’s suicide rate is 14 per 100,000 per year (World Health Organization). In other words, Foxconn’s suicide epidemic is actually lower than China’s national average of suicides.

I checked his figures. World Health Organization suicide figures for China (1999) are 13 males and 14.8 females per 100,000 people.

Elderly (65+ years) suicide rates can be as much as 50% higher than youth (18 to 24 years), which means Foxconn’s suicide rate, with its younger workforce, should be significantly below the national average.

Let’s estimate an average of 10 suicides per 100,000 at Foxconn. Just the Shenzhen Foxconn plant alone, with its 330,000 employees, would be expected to have about 33 suicides this year, or 14 so far.

Foxconn has had just 10 suicides this year, and that’s across its entire workforce. In other words, working at Foxconn dramatically reduces people’s risk of suicide!

Mr Mattimore is right, the media is misrepresenting the facts. He writes:

The larger problem stems from the fact that most journalists have not been taught to critically examine statistics. They follow the herd which often means that they report numbers without providing readers a context for making sense of those numbers.Hopefully, the public will wake up to the fact that there is nothing wrong at Foxconn and demand that newspapers act more responsibly and begin supplying some context when they decide to instigate their next corporate suicide watch.

Simply Because Foxconn Isn’t the Posterchild Doesn’t Mean There’s Not an Issue

The suicides at Foxconn have highlighted the issue of highly stressful working conditions in the global electronics industry. Foxconn has responded with psychologists, punch bags, swimming pools, and asking employees to promise not to kill themselves. But these moves do nothing to change the actual working conditions. Suicide numbers are a big red herring because even if they go down, huge numbers of workers will still suffer from low wages, long hours, and many other tough and unhealthy working conditions.

A recent BBC documentary series, "Blood, Sweat and Luxuries" took six young British consumers and placed them exotic locations working in the same jobs as locals, and having to survive on the same wages.

It’s an eye opening series because it showed the horrible work conditions that billions of people face daily, every week, for years, and decades. These were strong, healthy, young British adults, yet they would pass out from the back breaking work, suffer panic attacks, and many other maladies, after just a few hours on the job.

They carried huge amounts of dirt in Ghana’s gold fields; they processed leather in stinking abattoirs in Ethiopia; they dug deep holes in coffee plantations; and they had to work in an electronics factory in the Philippines where workers prepared tiny components for disk drives, processing one component every 3 seconds.

If they even took a moment to glance up from their tasks, or be distracted, they would fall behind in their quota and have their wages docked. It was incredible how much work had to be done for so little money by so many people. And the reason they were paid so little is that the electronics factory had to accept tiny profit margins in order to win its contracts.

All the large tech companies such as Apple, Nokia, Dell, etc have agreements with their suppliers that they do not employ children, and that they will abide by certain standards to protect workers. But it’s not clear how these are monitored, enforced, or how much in common they share across the electronics industry.

What is common across the electronics industry is a relentless focus on reducing manufacturing costs, and the largest manufacturing cost is labor; which is why employees are pushed to work faster, while maintaining high quality work, and at the lowest wages acceptable.

We reap the benefits in the form of cheap digital gadgets, gizmos, and computers. We have absolutely no idea about all the blood, sweat, and human suffering that went into creating our digital devices.

For the six young Brits that took part in that five week program, the experience was life changing. On their return they made big changes in their life styles, some changed their diets, and they all changed their buying habits. Some raised money and collected clothes and books for the families they met during their stay. And they found a new respect for Fair Trade goods.

Once Your Eyes are Opened, “Fair Trade” Means Something

One of them said that she used to dismiss Fair Trade coffee as some kind of marketing ploy, a trendy fashion. Now she doesn’t, and is happy to pay extra because she knows it does make a difference in the lives of many people.

Would you buy a Fair Trade iPhone or Android smartphone? Would you buy a Fair Trade Dell or HP PC if there were such choices? And how much extra would you be willing to pay? And more importantly, what would it take for you to be assured that the Fair Trade premium was making a difference in the lives of electronics workers?

It wasn’t that long ago when PCs typically cost $5,000 and lots of people paid it willingly. These days you can pick up powerful notebooks for under $1000, and netbooks for under $400. A $100 smartphone is more powerful than PCs from just a few years ago. Surely, we should be able to afford to pay a Fair Trade premium on electronics without too much suffering on our part.

And hopefully, the global media attention on the Foxconn suicides will result in improved working conditions for millions of electronics workers, and Fair Trade electronics goods will become commonplace.

There’s Always a Rush to be Second in Line

There’s a tremendous opportunity waiting to be grabbed. There’s a Wikipedia page waiting to be written.

"The first Fair Trade tech company was …"

I’m certain that the Fair Trade concept will be applied to electronics, and it’s just a matter of when that will happen. I’m convinced it will happen not because it’s a good idea but that it’s a potentially profitable idea. Our digital gadgets and gizmos are becoming very cheap, almost disposable – yet the working conditions for millions of workers in the global electronics industries are deplorable. Even though they often work in bunny suits, in super clean, well lighted work places, those jobs are highly stressful and often unhealthy.

Lets not forgot that those bright, sanitized work places, those clean work clothes, and filtered air conditioning, is not for the workers, it’s to protect the electronics from the humans. The wages are poor and the work is grueling. Fair Trade electronics could help tens of millions of people around the world without making much difference to our wallets. We could easily alleviate a lot of suffering without much suffering on our part, we could afford to pay a bit extra.

Noble goals are important but what will drive the growth of Fair Trade electronics is that it will be an excellent way to make money. It’s a great way for companies to differentiate themselves in the market place.

Consider this: All technology products trend towards becoming commoditized – that’s just how things work. How do companies fight commoditization? It’s done through differentiation.

– Companies such as Apple do it through design. Take a commodity product, say an MP3 music player, and apply a great design. Design drives sales and it is a high profit value add.

– A lot of computer companies these days proclaim how green they are, how eco aware they are, and how their products use less energy, carbon, etc. "Green" drives sales and it’s a high profit value-add.

– Fair Trade electronics is another way companies will be able to differentiate themselves from competitors. Fair Trade will drive sales and it is a high profit value add.

Yes, companies will be able to make money out of Fair Trade electronics and make a difference in the world- it’s one of the wonders of capitalism.

Fair Trade applied to the electronics industry will also be incredibly transformative because the supply chains are huge.

Think of a laptop and how many companies were involved in the sourcing of the components of a hard drive, the motherboard, making the chips, the glass for the screen, the plastic for the keyboard, the springs in the keys, the capacitors, the resistors, and on and on…

To make a Fair Trade laptop would require hundreds if not thousands of companies in the supply chain to have Fair Trade certified work places. So, if a company such as Dell or HP were able to build just one electronics product, a Fair Trade laptop, it would revolutionize a massive sector of the world’s electronics industry.

And once a supplier has a Fair Trade manufacturing facility it can then also supply Fair Trade components for a vast array of other Fair Trade electronics products.

The first Fair Trade tech company will revolutionize the entire industry.

Will the first Fair Trade tech company be Apple? The Ending is Not Yet Written.

I’ve been writing and thinking a lot about the concept of "Fair Trade Electronics" in recent weeks. The posts at Silicon Valley Watcher have seen great response from the public. The story now may not end with the open-ended question “Who will be first?”

I came across this story today, which seems to show that maybe Apple will become the first Fair Trade Tech company.
Apple Providing Subsidies For Foxconn Workers ? » M.I.C Gadget

Apple might be showing their social responsibility for now. A tech site in China has reported, Apple will provide financial subsidies to Foxconn’s employees, the amount will roughly be 1 to 2% of the profits from Apple products. Apple has conducted investigation on Foxconn, and they believe the main reason for the suicide jumps is related to the employees’ low wages. In order to solve the problem, Apple decides to offer a direct financial subsidies for the workers in Foxconn, it will first start from the iPad production line. It was reported that Apple paid Foxconn about 2.3% of the total price of iPad, after the subsidies, it will expected to reach 3%, which is equivalent to the producing cost of the iPad aluminum shell-case.
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[Zol.com.cn]
zol.com.cn is a well-known China IT portal under CBS Interactive, you can see more info here.

You can be sure there will be more written here and elsewhere on the topic. You can keep an eye on my column here at SiliconANGLE, my Twitter account, or my blog, Silicon Valley Watcher for more updates on the issue.

[Editor’s Note: This post is compiled from a series of short essays on Fair Trade in the electronics industry by Tom Foremski, originally published at Silicon Valley Watcher, edited and reprinted with permission here at SiliconANGLE. Some images courtesy of Damien Van Achter. –mrh]