Following a string of suicides at its Chinese factories, Foxconn Technology Group raised workers' wages and installed safety nets on buildings to catch would-be jumpers. Now the often secretive manufacturer of the iPhone and other electronics is holding rallies for its workers to raise morale at the heavily regimented factories.

Young migrant workers in Shenzhen, just like their parents, have to work long hours in hazardous conditions for low pay. The key difference between the generations, a new survey shows, is that the expectations of younger workers are much higher than their parents, seeking to establish a life for themselves in the city rather than return to the countryside.

In response to widespread criticism of working conditions at its factories in China, Foxconn announced on 2 June that it is raising the wages of its Chinese workforce by an average of 30 percent. The announcement came a week after Li Ming, spokesman for the Shenzhen Municipal Human Resources and Social Security Bureau, revealed that the city would increase its minimum wage on 1 July this year.

For the past 10 months, construction worker Wang Jianquan has been travelling back and forth between his home in rural Gansu and Beijing in the hope of getting wages he says he is owed. "They owe me three months' pay," the 36-year-old migrant worker said. "But I'm afraid to go back to the construction site because when we went before, they beat us."

Hours after Foxconn boss and founder Terry Guo led 200 journalists around the company’s Longhua facility in Shenzhen, another young worker jumped to his death, bringing the total number of such suicides at the plant to ten this year, with three just this week. And according to unconfirmed reports another young woman survived a fall early in the hours of Thursday morning, the third attempted suicide this year.

Reports from the Financial Times, Daily Telegraph, Christian Science Monitor, Radio Australia and RTHK on the Foxconn suicides.

Nearly 60 percent of companies in Shenzhen actively discriminate against prospective employees on the basis of age, gender, health, appearance or residency, a new investigative report has revealed. Women suffer from a disproportionately high level discrimination, the report found, particularly in the service sector where “appearance” is regularly included in recruitment criteria.

Hong Kong-based Students and Scholars Against Corporate Misbehavior (SACOM) staged a demonstration this morning (25 May) outside the Hong Kong corporate headquarters of Foxconn to protest and mourn the alarming number of deaths of young workers at the electronic giant’s Shenzhen facility this year.

Huada Electrical Appliances has piles of orders from abroad -- a welcome sign that China's exports are bouncing back after the global economic crisis. But the television and computer components company has just one-fifth of the 300 people it needs to work the assembly line to fill those orders by the end of June. "Our hair is turning grey because of the anxiety," a company executive, who would only give her surname Wu, told AFP, explaining that the firm was recruiting everywhere -- on pavements, near food markets and with job agencies.

If you ask a factory worker or a waitress in the Pearl River Delta if they have had a pay raise recently, they will either stare at you blankly or just burst out laughing. Photo. Zhongshan factory workers. TravelGeographer.