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Foxconn will replace sweatshop labour with robots
CHINESE ELECTRONICS MAKER Foxconn has announced that it intends to deploy one million robots over the next three years.
Foxconn, which makes electronics products for Apple, Nokia and Sony among many others, employs 10,000 people. However Terry Gou, Foxconn's CEO chose a "worker's dance party" to announce that many of them could end up out of work thanks to his plan to introduce one million robots within the next three years. The robots will be used to do "simple and routine work" including spraying, welding and assembly.
Last year Foxconn faced widespread criticism following suicides of workers and reports of terrible working conditions. The negative press shamed the company into raising wages, though now that looks like nothing more than a catalyst to get rid of a lot of staff altogether.
Gou said that the reason behind Foxconn's decision to invest in robots was due to increasing labour rates and a desire to increase efficiency. Essentially by paying his staff a fair wage, Gou has priced them out of the market.
Foxconn said that it will stagger the deployment of robots with 300,000 in 2012 and one million by 2014. There was no word on what would happen to the company's workers, but our guess is that their severance pay might cover their bus fare home and not much else. µ
Tags: Hardware
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As soon as you deploy thousands of robots you wipe out any advantage that cheap labour may bring.
Or in other words once you start using heavily robotised factories the salient factors are more about energy costs and supply chains than how much your staff costs - and you can afford to pay what remaining staff you have pretty well - you'll have to to keep the highly skilled ones.
Future Shock, anyone?
(FWIW the Japanese ship building industry didn't wipe out the UK one through cheap labour - it did it by using welding techniques which meant one japanese worker could do the same work as 20 british ones. Work smarter, not harder. Same principle applies here - Longbridge could be very profitable if humans are eliminated as much as possible)
All I heard from this post is "buy as much fertile land as you can!".
As the Earth's population increases (thanks to religious people who think it's ok to give birth to lots of children without giving him any land resources so that they won't be wage slaves), food will become more and more expensive and wages will go lower and lower.
The funny thing is that the Chinese are now tasting the same bitter medicine they gave to the Europeans, Americans and Japanese. In plain english, India and Malaysia are pricing them out of the market. Because India and Malaysia are now more overpopulated than China, and their population is more willing to work for a penny and a half.