Discussion

Decades of research show that both Western and Taiwanese researchers have found that the two most observable characteristics of labor news to be its infrequency and negative portrayal of labor (Cirino, 1971; Morley, 1981; Parenti, 1986; Puette, 1992).

This thesis, which aims to explore the media representation of labor coverage in the Foxconn suicide jumps, confirmed both long-discussed observations.

Martin (2004) once regarded the most distinctive feature of mainstream coverage of labor is that “the media are often not covering labor at all.” Findings of the present research confirmed this argument in terms of the rare appearance of labor as source in stories. Source analysis revealed that of the 222 articles, only 36 of them quoted a worker as source, which is less than half of the number of employers. In other words, the four Taiwanese dailies covered the Foxconn suicide jumps with very little labor subjectivity. Employers, in contrast, accounted for the most part in the news. The findings also correspond to Feng’s research (2001), which found that labor news with workers as the main subject was very limited between 1945 and 1998 in Taiwan’s newspapers, with less than one piece of news per day on average. After these decades, the situation has not changed at all in Taiwan. Fairclough (1989) noted that source is so important in news reporting that it reflects the unequal groupings in the social hierarchy. That is, if certain group’s perspective is commonly adopted in news, its discourse is more likely to become the dominant discourse. The rare appearance of a worker in coverage not only demonstrates labor’s disadvantaged place in media, whose agenda and discourse show the media’s unfair treatment and

“sub-dued” by those of the employers.

With regards to the portrayal of workers and employers, the results of the present study suggested that the four Taiwanese dailies contributed both positive and

negative descriptions to the two subjects. For workers, positive coverage was mainly distributed over human interest frame by probing into those young workers’ working life and sorrows of this generation. Negative descriptions usually occurred when it came to the attribution of responsibility, where they were often criticized to be too fragile to handle pressure at work. On the other hand, while employers were criticized to be cruel and indifferent in management, some articles also defended the company from different perspectives, such as working welfare, suicide rates, enterprise culture, and historical context. In short, both workers and employers received relatively balanced comments in these two news frames.

One significant finding in the descriptions of employers is that the four dailies tended to manipulate the context and the use of photographs in referring to the

employers.

In the coverage of the Foxconn suicides, employers had attracted much media attention, especially the company chairman, Terry Guo. As shown in the analysis, Guo, the news focus, was always described with both his emotional response and practical policies to the incident magnified, such as “tired”, “tense”, “deeply painful”,

“occupied”, and “teary red eyes.” While these adjectives are infectious by carrying heavy emotions, they are likely to shift the focus of the incident and sympathize Guo himself.

Similar image-building strategy was also employed in the use of photographs.

For Guo, his pictures often appeared to be “dynamic” with his various expressions and movements in a “head-and-shoulders-only” image. According to Hall (1973), such a composition enhances the power of the expressive dimension in such a way to inflect or displace the story away from its original point, towards some aspect of the figure in focus. In other words, the application of “personalizing transformation”

helped transfer the news focus from the incident to his personal response. Although such an application is only identified in the use of news photographs in the first place, this thesis, as aforementioned, also finds similar use in literary frames, in which adjectives that carry strong emotions are applied to serve the same function as the image.

In the “economic consequence” frame, after the company announced a series of wage increase policies on June 1, the four dailies began to change their news discourse to favor the employers more. Foxconn, in this case, turned out to be a generous employer, who voluntarily raised the salaries by a large percentage without its workers’ request. Furthermore, media discourse in this period also focused on economic consequences by suggesting that the policy had brought “pressure”,

“management crisis”, and “inestimable loss” to Foxconn and other Taiwan-based companies in China, and even extended it to a possible worldwide “inflation” in the near future. Foxconn, together with other companies in China and consumers

worldwide, seemed to have suddenly been “victimized” by the wage increase policy.

Workers, on the other hand, indirectly became the one who caused these consequences.

Such news presentations were found to correspond to the concept of Martin’s consumer-oriented frames (2004). In the Foxconn’s case, the articles seemed to describe those business leaders and entrepreneurs as the ones who drive the economy.

Therefore, when the wage increase policy threatens the companies’ survival, the economy is likely to be damaged, and the consumer is always the first to face the consequences. These descriptions actually create a different form of conflict that lies between consumers and labor. Because the audience is usually the consumer

themselves, they tend to interpret the issue from their own perspectives. If labor rights

contradict consumer interest, the pressure on the labor side would become even heavier.

In short, in the coverage of the Foxconn suicides, the press showed its

sympathy to worker’s difficult life in big cities, yet it also “reproached” them on other accounts. It can be said that labor in media is presented not with a totally negative image as suggested in previous research, but with a mixture of positive stories and criticism.

In addition, Chyi and McCombs (2004) contended that during the dynamic process of news making, news media manipulate the issue by emphasizing various attributes at different stages. In other words, a news event is not static. Instead, it is dynamic, and so is the news frame used to present it. Usually, certain key events in an incident could influence media discourse (Gamson & Modigliani, 1989). In the Foxconn’s case, June 1, the day when the company announced a series of wage increase policies, serves as a significant divide in the shift of the frames in the news coverage of the Foxconn suicide incident. Before the pivotal day, the dailies employed the “attribution of responsibility” frame the most to find out the reasons for the

consecutive suicide jumps, while later shifted to “economic consequence” with a special focus on the impact to the original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) industry and the economy in general. Furthermore, workers’ chance of being quoted in news also changed after the divide. Before June 1, there were some quotations from workers, while after the divide, they seemed to have disappeared in the coverage.

Although the wage increase policy is an issue between employers and workers, it turned out that employers dominated the coverage with very little voice from workers.

A similar shift can also be observed in the use of tone. The findings showed that despite a large percentage of neutral stories, positive coverage of workers

decreased, while negative coverage increased. In contrast, in coverage of employers, positive stories increased, whereas negative stories dropped. In other words, as the incident developed, press coverage tended to change its attitude to favor employers more. This finding corresponded to Martin’s observation (2004) on the news report of several labor events. In the research, he suggested that the corporate media tend to fool the public by shifting the framing of news event to benefit their advertisers in the wake of a series of pro-worker coverage. In the Foxconn case, it can be found that the period after June 1 was crucial to observe such a shift. The wage increase policy seemed to highlight the operation difficulty of the OEMs industry is likely to worsen after the raise. It seems that the news appeared to reestablish corporate-friendly framing of the incident afterwards, as suggested by Martin (2004).

With regards to the difference by political affiliation, several findings in this thesis are found to correspond to previous research. For example, Liberty Times covered the event much less. Reasons for such findings could be attributed to different political affiliations for each newspaper, as Lee (1998) suggested that the

pro-independence Liberty Times usually pays less attention to China affairs and is the only newspaper among the four to go without a China news center, nor a specific section for China news. In contrast, the pro-unification United Daily and China Times had the most coverage on the suicide incidents. In addition, the political orientation can be suspiciously observed in Liberty Times’s negative opinion about Chinese government as well as other China-related affairs, such as ECFA, in its editorials.

These results confirmed Feng’s (2001) inclusion of political affiliation as an important factor when examining labor coverage.