Today’s NY Times reports that Foxconn will raise employee’s salaries by 33 percent. Assembly line workers will now go from the equivalent of approximately $132 per month to $176 per month. A week earlier, company chairman Terry Gou, had promised to improve conditions at the factory and to quell the rash of suicides plaguing the company, denying there is a correlation between worker’s salaries and the suicides. According to the Times:
The company, which is based in Taiwan and employs more than 800,000 workers in China, has denied that the suicides were work-related or above the national average, saying instead that they were the result of social ills and personal problems of young, migrant workers. Foxconn said Wednesday that the decision to raise salaries was not a direct response to the suicides.
For some insight and a bit of the backstory, check out this audio clip from the folks over at Future Tense from last week. It’s about 45 seconds in.