Inside the heavily secured complex outside Shenzen, China, known as the Foxconn City, we find the home of about 420,000 workers[…] Foxconn is perhaps most famous for the recent string of suicides[…] On the surface, Foxconn does not look like a labour camp. A guided tour through the premises yields a picture quite unlike the factories of the industrial dark ages. Here we find swimming pools, tennis courts and gyms as well as numerous clubs for employees, in chess, calligraphy and fishing, to name a few. The only catch is that none of these facilities are to be used. Apart from short breaks for lunch and sleep, the workers have no free time[…]

To investigate the working conditions at Foxconn, the Chinese newspaper Southern Quarterly sent a team of undercoer reporters. After 28 days of immense suffering they came back to report about a life completely overtaken by work. As they reported: 'The workers we have spoken to say that their hands continue to twitch at night, or that when they are walking down the street they cannot help but mimic the motion. They are never able to relax their minds. As one of the reporters surmised, 'for many workers, the only escape from this cycle was to end their lives'. In the attempt to curb the suicide epidemic, Foxconn management have gone to great lengths. They have put safety nets between buildings to catch falling workers. They have opened a stress room, where employees can beat up life-sized dolls with baseball bats. Only a hundred counsellors have been called in. And thirty Buddhist monks have been summoned 'to release the suicide souls from purgatory'. Foxconn are now leading innovations in a new field of management … suicide management.

from Carl Cederstrom and Peter Fleming, Dead Man Working