Please do not buy an iPhone or related equipment for the month of June.

Please also sign the petition in support of workers who make iPhones:

http://www.gopetition.com/online/36639.html

Many of you may already have heard of the spate of worker suicides at the Shenzhen factories of Foxconn, a company that produces iPhones for Apple. Worker rights activists have been trying to call attention to conditions at Foxconn since before the first deaths. Foxconn has better industrial hygiene than most factories in the area, and the pay is at least nominally higher (when it is not being withheld), but there is something poisonous in the culture of the Foxconn factories. Mainstream western media has been relying on Foxconn and Apple press releases for their information, so I have pasted a link to the best, most detailed account of the deaths that I could find.

The best article:

http://interlocals.net/?q=node/343 The second half of this article compiles individual local media reports of each death.

A protest at Foxconn's Hong Kong offices:

The young woman on the megaphone is my friend Debby. Sadly, another suicide occurred the same day this protest occurred. When I first saw this video, I thought they were burning iPhones as an expression of disgust, but later I found out they were burning them as offerings to the dead. It's interesting to learn modes of protest from other cultures.

An in memoriam page by Chinese university students:

http://guanaifskgy.blog.163.com/ The song is titled "Grief" and was written for the site by a student. This site had very moving pictures of a worker's family members who had traveled to the Foxconn factory site to express their grief publicly, but they are not there anymore. I will try to find them elsewhere.

-- AmandaBell - 01 Jun 2010