Microsoft Employees Threaten Suicide At Xbox Plant Over Poor Treatment, Low Wages

Bill Gates like to play philanthropist in public.

He likes to go around making believe he actually cares about people and wants to help them.

But if he cares so much about people, why does he run slave labor factories to make his Microsoft products?

SEATTLE, Wash. (CBS Seattle) – Some 300 Chinese Foxconn employees who manufacture X-box 360 machines said they would throw themselves from their Wuhan, China, plant if demands for lost wages were not met.

China Jasmine Revolution, an activist revolutionary organization with a name borrowed from the Tunisian revolt that set off the Middle East unrest, reported that employees made their demands for a wage increase for 100 employees on Jan. 2.

Management at Foxconn — the world’s largest contract electronics manufacturer and a crucial link in the supply chains of Apple, Dell, Nintendo and Song — responded with an ultimatum. Employees could quit with one month’s compensation awarded for each year with the plant or go back to working.

Many employees quit, but Foxconn allegedly dishonored the agreement and awarded former employees nothing.

Around 300 workers returned to the plant in an uproar, and staged their protest on the plant’s roof on Jan. 3.

Wuhan’s mayor intervened through hours of negotiations, walking them back from the roof’s edge until 9 p.m. when workers agreed to return to work, according to China.com

So how did Microsoft respond to this?

With jive:

A Microsoft spokesperson wrote CBS Seattle a statement saying, “Microsoft takes working conditions in the factories that manufacture its products very seriously, and we are currently investigating this issue. We have a stringent Vendor Code of Conduct that spells out our expectations, and we monitor working conditions closely on an ongoing basis and address issues as they emerge. Microsoft is committed to the fair treatment and safety of workers employed by our vendors, and to ensuring conformance with Microsoft policy.” ­

Somebody needs to ask Bill Gates the next time he's pontificating about "bad teachers" and the need to fire them in order to help kids from low-income families rise out of poverty why it is he makes his Microsoft products in slave labor camps and factories in China which keeps people in poverty?

To be fair to Microsoft, Apple and other companies use FOXXCONN to make their crap too.

And to be fair to Gates, former Apple CEO Steve Jobs liked to play Buddha on TV, so Gates isn't the only hypocrite from the tech world using slave labor to make his products while acting "Holier Than Thou."

In Jobs' case, I do hope when he is reincarnated back to this world, he comes as an Apple employee at FOXXCONN making Apple products in slave labor conditions so he can get an inkling of the harm he caused during his life.

As for Gates, I'd like to see the media stenographers who spend all their time sucking up to him (or his wife, the equally villainous and hypocritical Melinda) ask him how he reconciles his "philanthropy" and "charity" notions with the plain fact that he runs slave labor factories that harm hundreds of thousands of people.

Seriously, read the drivel Melinda Gates "chats" about in the above Times blog I linked to and try and reconcile that with the FOXXCONN story.

The words that come to mind are "Bleeding Hypocrites!"