The spectre of suicide has returned to Foxconn, with a 25-year-old female employee jumping to her death after she allegedly received a harsh dressing down and was told to resign.
Wang Ling, who had worked in an engineering department of Foxconn Technology Group since 2005, died on Friday morning after jumping from her brother's 10th-floor flat in Shenzhen's Yantian district.
The world's largest electronics manufacturing services provider, Foxconn makes devices including Apple's iPod. The group employs more than a million in China.
Her brother, Wang Chunfeng, said yesterday she had received a company e-mail in her office at Foxconn's Longhua plant last Tuesday morning that told her to resign. 'My sister said a Taiwanese supervisor had harshly criticised her - or you can call it an insult - when she tried to find out more about why she was being asked to quit,' he said.
'She was sent to the Shenzhen Kangning psychiatric hospital that afternoon by Foxconn, which called us in the evening to take her back from the dormitory.' Wang Chunfeng said his sister had a further consultation with psychiatrists at the hospital last Wednesday, before returning to her dormitory and staying overnight. The psychiatrists diagnosed her as schizophrenic.
'On Thursday her line manager insisted on sending her back to us, saying, 'Wang Ling is exhibiting a lot of abnormal behaviour', and suggesting we send her back to her hometown in Hubei province for further treatment,' the brother said. He said Foxconn had promised to keep his sister's position open and let her resume work within three months if she recovered. Less than 24 hours later, Wang Ling jumped to her death.
An officer at Haishan police station, which investigated her death, confirmed she had committed suicide and was a Foxconn employee. 'We eliminated the possibility that she was murdered,' he said.