ABSTRACT
The body of nineteen-year-old Ma Xiangqian was found at 4:30 A.M. in front of his high-rise company’s campus dormitory. The police concluded that he had committed suicide, leaping to his death from a high floor balcony. Ma reportedly hated his work at Foxconn, the world’s biggest contract electronics supplier with over four hundred thousand employees in Shenzhen, China, making products for global companies like Apple, Dell, and Hewlett-Packard. Ma’s recent pay stub indicated that he worked 286 hours in the month before his death, including 112 hours of overtime, which was about three times the legal limit. He had worked for about three months on an extended overnight shift, seven nights a week, beginning with metal and plastic parts assembly amid dust and fumes, until he was demoted to toilet-cleaning after a conflict with his supervisor.
