Tech firm Foxconn has confessed that it paid insufficient attention to workers' welfare following the death of an eighth employee.
Twenty-one-year-old Nan Wang was the tenth Foxconn worker to jump from a building this year at the Longhua industrial complex of Shenzhen last week.
The two employees that did not die sustained severe injuries. All the victims were below 25-years-old and had worked at the company for less than a year.
Foxconn responded to angry employees, who blamed the lower-level management and insufficient provision of psychological counseling for the tragedies this year: "Has the enterprise provided sufficient mechanisms and opportunities for them to communicate and interact with each other? I feel that Foxconn has not done enough in the past," Foxconn spokesman Liu Kun admitted in an interview with state television at the weekend.
Many workers claim that they feel lonely, as they are surrounded by strangers both at work and in their homes and human contact is limited: "I've worked here for about one-and-a-half months and I've only met my dorm mates twice. And I haven't spoken more than five sentences in total to them," an unidentified male Foxconn employee said.
Wages are so low in China that exhausted workers who wish to take a rest are forced to do overtime. After ten years of employment the basic wage is around 1090 yuan (around £110 per month).
