Bad incentives

[bokamba]

After a series of employee suicides, Foxconn, a major electronics manufacturer, will no longer provide payments to the families of employees who kill themselves. It's strange that they would have offered such payments to begin with, considering that it created an incentive for someone sufficiently desperate or crazy to commit suicide. That's why

Comments

[writer1985]

It seems odd that they would pay the families, because that seems to imply some sort of culpability on the company's part. Better to invest that money into programs to help at-risk employees, or to improve the atmosphere at work.

[bokamba]

Quite right. The implication of culpability is why a company in the US would never do this; in China, you don't have to be quite as worried about lawsuits (but that's changing).

Foxconn is taking other measures such as increasing pay and trying to workers' improve quality of life.