The victims all worked on the assembly line making electronic gadgets for some of the world’s richest corporations, including Samsung, Sony and Dell. But it was Apple that received the most criticism, as Foxconn was its main supplier at the time.

Labor rights activists argue that corporations such as Apple and their contracted suppliers should be jointly responsible for creating the working conditions and management pressure that might have triggered workplace suicides. Extensive interviews with one of the Foxconn survivors, a woman called Tian Yu who was 17-years-old when she attempted suicide, detailed a harsh production regime. She said she had to work 12-hour shifts, skipped meals to work overtime and often only had one day off every second week.

Apple published a set of standards for how workers should be treated in the aftermath, but its suppliers continued to be dogged by accusations that these were breached. In December 2014, for example, the BBC ran a documentary called “Apple’s Broken Promises” which showed how the company had failed to improve working conditions four years after the crisis. Undercover filming showed exhausted workers falling asleep on 12-hour shifts and workers being yelled at repeatedly by managers at new supplier, Pegatron Shanghai, where the latest iPhones are assembled.

Pegatron said in response to the BBC investigation that it would investigate the reports and take necessary action if any deficiencies were found in their factories. Apple maintains that it does do all it can to monitor its supplier’s practices with its annual supplier responsibility reports. Meanwhile, labour rights activists and researchers continue to allege abuse of workers in the company’s supply chains.

Writing at the end of the 19th century, French sociologist Emile Durkheim suggested that suicide was a kind of mirror to society that revealed the fundamental nature of the social order at a given historical juncture. France Télécom and Foxconn are at different ends of the globalization spectrum – one employs white-collar workers in high-tech service occupations and the other recruits young rural migrants to work on the assembly line. Yet suicides in these two places reveal the common face of a global economic order that too often allows profit to take precedence over all else.

Meanwhile it continues to be business as usual for many of the richest multinational corporations in the world. But it’s high time that all corporations across the spectrum took responsibility for their own abuses.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.