When the pressures of work are too much for employees to handle

By Daniel Penton

At approximately 01:44am in Shenzhen, Southern China, Sun Danyong took the elevator to the 12th floor of his apartment. Surveillance cameras show the 25-year-old Foxconn employee sitting on the window ledge for over an hour before leaping to his death at 3:33am.

Danyong’s suicide wasn’t an isolated case at the Taiwanese technology company, responsible for manufacturing electronics for Apple, Dell and Sony to name a few. Between January and May 2010, twelve Foxconn employees attempted suicide, resulting in ten deaths. The case brought unwanted attention to the company with many media outlets criticizing the long working hours, low pay and harsh management methods, including allegations of physical abuse towards employees by their superiors.

What emerged from subsequent reports were complaints from staff about monotonous work schedules and inhumane working relationships. One employee even complained about being at the company for half a year and not knowing the names of his dormitory mates.

Not above the China suicide rate

Despite the high numbers, the suicides at the company – which employs approximately 800,000 people, with 300,000 alone working at the factory in Shenzhen – when compared to China's overall suicide rate, was not statistically unusual,. However, the rapid succession of suicides and the young age of those involved is anything but average.

As a result of the media firestorm, Terry Gou, the CEO of Hon Hai - the conglomerate that owns Foxconn - personally became involved. In late May, he explained that the large number of employees at the factory made management difficult, but the company would soon improve the situation. Hours after his media appearance, he headed back to Shenzhen when learning of another suicide attempt at the factory.

To cope with the crisis, Foxconn formed "employee care centers" and hired psychologists to offer counseling.  There have even been reports of employees having to sign pledges stating that they will not commit suicide. This led to some suggesting a change to Foxconn’s management systems, philosophy, and methods to create a more humane work environment.

Steve Jobs, the Apple CEO, has defended the conditions of the factory saying: “Foxconn is not a sweatshop. They’ve got restaurants and swimming pools. For a factory, it’s a pretty nice factory.”

Not just a Far East issue

Unfortunately, Foxconn is just one example of an alarming trend of workplace suicides.  Between the beginning of January 2008 and the end of January 2010, thirty-five France Telecom employees took their own lives. Suicide notes left behind blamed stress and misery at work as the cause. Unions blamed the suicides partly on layoffs and restructuring; one victim who worked in the debt-collection service of the company’s Orange subsidiary  had been involved in discussions on restructuring.

During this period, the suicide rate among France Telecom’s 102,000 domestic employees was 15.3 per year, compared with an average of 14.7 suicides per 100,000 in the French population as a whole.

The incidents received widespread media exposure which led to Deputy CEO Louis-Pierre Wenes to resign under trade union pressure in October 2009.

Bonuses for social performance, not economic

To control the troubling situation, the telecoms giant recently proposed recruiting more staff and making job transfers voluntary, not mandatory.

The company’s 1,100 managers, including the CEO, Stéphane Richard, would see 30 to 50 per cent of their salaries based not just on economic performance, but on ‘social’ performance, such as employee attendance and satisfaction.

Additionally, the group is providing managers with sensitivity training and is decentralising many decisions that previously would have been taken on a national level.

According to Richard, “The company’s response in the face of the social crisis we’ve just been through and that we continue to go through.”

Consulting company Technologia, was tasked with analysing the problems at France Telecom and offered 107 proposals at the beginning of March to reduce employees’ stress. These included putting mediators in place and reforming management and human resources.

In spite of all the measures taken, some critics felt the crisis communications plans came four months too late.

An issue for every company?

No place is immune to workplace suicides, but is it an endemic problem that gets swept under the carpet in most cases? According to a census by the U.S. Department of Labor, there was a 28 percent increase in the number of suicides committed in the workplace in 2008 over the prior year.

Other 2008 numbers reveal:
•    94 per cent of workplace suicides were committed by men, even though males worked just 57 per cent of the nation’s job hours.
•    The workplace suicide rate was highest among employees ages 45-54 accounting for 36 per cent of such deaths. Workers in the age range represented just 25 per cent of hours worked.
•    Caucasion workers committed 78 per cent of workplace suicides and accounted for 69 per cent of total hours worked.
•    Employees in management positions accounted for the largest group of suicides (14 percent).

Suicide clusters

Research into employee suicides has shown that people’s choices are affected by their surroundings. Since various types of behavior, feelings, and attitudes are spread in social networks, researchers at Stockholm University and the University of Oxford have studied whether a drastic step like taking your life can also be influenced by others. The study is based on comprehensive data on all individuals who lived and worked in Stockholm County during the 1990s. Findings include:

•    The risk of suicide increased markedly both for women and men if someone in the family had taken their own life (something that has been confirmed by previous research).
•    Men’s risk of suicides increased if they had one or more workmates take their own life in the last year.
•    Twice as many suicides among men can be ascribed to the “contagious effect” of the workplace than to that of the family.
 
The Hidden Toll

Away from Scandinavia, work-related suicides have recently been gaining a lot of press in Australia these last six months. In June 2010, the Australian Government released a report into suicide called “The Hidden Toll: Suicide in Australia”.  While it covers suicide as a social issue, there are some mentions in the report about work-related suicides that are worth noting.

It states the following example of suicide in a community that can be translated to the workplace:

“Ms Dulcie Bird of the Dr Edward Koch Foundation argued that whole communities are often affected when a suicide occurs and described low estimates of the number of people effected by suicide as ‘a load of nonsense’. She gave the example of the suicide of a 16-year-old boy in a small town and noted her organisation had completed ’43 face-to-face interventions for that one suicide’. The Foundation commented that suicide results in the loss of the deceased person’s contribution to society as a whole.

“This loss to society is then compounded through the impact of that loss on the ability to function at an optimum level of productivity (both within the home and the workplace) when people are massively impacted by someone near to them suiciding. Also there is the wider impact on the broader community’s psyche following an individual’s loss. There is as well, the fear for the wellbeing of that person’s social network as this group has been identified as being at greater risk of suicide in the postvention period.”

The report also mentioned Australian companies becoming active on the issue of mental health and its relation to suicides: “The NSW Government noted Mental Health First Aid training would also be rolled out to RailCorp station staff in 2010 as part of an initiative ‘to address the risk and incidence of suicide in the NSW rail system’.”

The report pointed to the active role that workplaces, social groupings and networks have in discussing suicide and establishing communication pathways that may deter suicides.

Biggest workplace challenge

Mental health promises to become one of the greatest challenges to companies and safety professionals over the coming years. While the problem is often overlooked, it goes without saying that giving employees the proper support and guidance is vital to how they cope with workplace pressure and tragic situations.

In an interview with The Guardian newspaper last year, Tonja Schmidt, head of development and evaluation at the Samaritans said: "We encourage people to talk about it seriously."

"Stigma makes people feel isolated and that makes things worse. Talk to each other and not just to the staff directly affected. It's hard to know how to handle a suicide when it occurs but you do have to be sensitive without adding to the trauma. If you don't deal with it employees will get the impression that you just don't care and, at a time when someone felt desperate to take their own life, an uncaring attitude is the last thing you should have."