Significantly higher than that, from what I understand. It's actually one of those unfortunately 'uninteresting' headlines that will just never make headlines: "Foxconn suicides significantly below national averages."
Remember: newspapers and blogs are in the selling eyeballs business, not in the reporting news business.
From the linked Telegraph article, "For those who believe the spate of suicides is statistically in line, given how many people work at Foxconn, consider this: the company says it has prevented a further 30 people from trying to kill themselves in the past three weeks alone."
Those who committed suicide were between 18 and 29 years old. The suicide rate in mainland China for 15 to 24 year olds is 0.007 percent, the suicide rate for 25 to 34 year olds is 0.015 percent (WHO, 1999, http://www.who.int/mental_health/media/chin.pdf).
I wouldn’t be so fast with comparisons, though. You might have to double your percentage (the suicides happened between January and May 2010). I also don’t know whether suicides of Foxconn workers not on company estates are included. That might skew the numbers substantially.
Of course! These people are in a war! They get slaughtered, they slaughter, they can get woken up anytime by a crazy ally shooting everybody! They can't trust even most common items as they can be stuffed with explosives. They can't trust the locals because they might be after them.
Would you like your workplace to be like that? I mean, I hope that there is no workplace as stressful as a war.
To be fair, this is no the only thing they did, and it is a lot more visual than the other methods they tried. Visual can be good.
They had to do the same thing at a mall near where I live, they strung up safety nets to stop people jumping the 7 stories to their deaths. Of course, there weren't workers at the mall, but it is just something you can do, on top of the usual.
