Foxconn May Close Factories In China 476
ChiefMonkeyGrinder writes "Foxconn, the manufacturer whose clients include Apple, Dell, and HP, is on the verge of pulling out of China after a spate of suicides. The CEO has accused workers of killing themselves for financial compensation, and the company has stopped suicide payments to suicide victims' families. Foxconn's CEO also told investors that it is considering moving its production operations to Taiwan, and automating many parts of its business, a move which could see 800,000 workers lose their jobs."
Instead of actually addressing the problem... (Score:3, Insightful)
All this will do is just move the problem. Unless they thought having to actually give a damn about those workers was a problem.
Re:Instead of actually addressing the problem... (Score:3, Insightful)
Poor Planning (Score:5, Insightful)
Instead of suicide bounties from Foxconn exec's (Score:1, Insightful)
How about bounties for Foxconn executives?
[/joke]
Re:Poor Planning (Score:2, Insightful)
So.. factories are *moving* within china (Score:2, Insightful)
Taiwan = RoC: Republic of China
Mainland China = PRC: People's Republic of China...
And that doesn't even consider the eventual reunification that *both* sides desire. (although the desired terms are wildly different...)
Anyway, I know it's great to have people employed, but if it can be automated, why wasn't it before now? The more tedious jobs we can do with machines, the more people are freed up for other things.
You can't transition to a "post-scarcity" economy without putting a few people out of work, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be a goal.
I want a fact check (Score:3, Insightful)
Foxconn employs almost 1 million people? Really? 1 million out of 1.3 billion?
There's no way they are going back to Taiwan. Labor costs are 5x higher. The logistics are higher cost too.
Maybe Foxconn's days are numbered as an Apple OEM and this is just the blame shifting.
The bottom line is that Western consumers are perfectly happy supporting distopian labor conditions.
Re:Instead of actually addressing the problem... (Score:3, Insightful)
It reminds me of the business that removed the clocks from the waiting room in response to complaints about wait times.
What happens when China goes Democratic? (Score:5, Insightful)
No jokes about that horrible Guns n Roses album, shudder.
The first world for the past 40 years has been using China as a source of cheap industrial labor that relied heavily upon absolute totalitarianism finds itself dealing with nascent labor unions, human rights organization and popular dissent and outrage during times of strife and disaster. As this increasingly puts strain on the kleptocratic communist party and the equally corrupt Chinese state military a rumbling/robust market economy is emerging that stands to give a significant financial foothold to an emerging Chinese middle class to the world's 3rd largest economy. Once you have a middle class anything goes, once you lose one, well...
No army in the world can stop an idea whose time has come. - Victor Hugo
Maths don't matter to reality! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Poor Planning (Score:3, Insightful)
The labor being cheap mostly because the Chinese government doesn't enforce labor laws and doesn't give the people their fair share of the profits.
First part about the labor laws, seems like a valid complaint. But the second part, about 'fair share of the profits'. Where does that come from? As an employee, you are getting paid for the work you are doing not any profit that is made. If you want to get a share of the profits, you need to be a share holder. Some companies do offer 'profit-sharing', but that definitely not the norm.
Re:Suicide Rates (Score:3, Insightful)
This is about work related suicides, and each one of them must be looked into separately and not as a mere number in a statistic. The case with the lost iPhone should especially be taken seriously in regarding to whether executives behaved like Gestapos.
Re:Suicide Rates (Score:1, Insightful)
The suicide rate in Canada is about 3600 deaths per year for 1992 in a population of 28.4 million.
How many of those 3600 offed themselves at the office? How many Foxconn workers offed themselves at home?
Re:Poor Planning (Score:3, Insightful)
Sacrificing yourself so your family can get financial help seems to be the motive. In which case, stopping payments for suicide would remove the motive.
Probably why life insurance companies don't pay out on suicide.
Re:I want a fact check (Score:3, Insightful)
Damn our minimum wages, safe working conditions, evironmental laws and employee protection laws!
Re:Poor Planning (Score:5, Insightful)
"Killing yourself for financial compensation is a poor long-term business plan."
Depends on your cultural POV.
In China, families and groups matter while life is historically very cheap. Consider the custom of "human wave" military attacks during the Korean War. Chinese soldiers quite bravely flung themselves at their objectives, sometimes winning, sometimes not, but often being shot down in droves.
We are used to a future with hope, which we consider perfectly normal. The rest of the world is by and large a hellhole where dying to benefit ones family may be a good call.
Re:So.. factories are *moving* within china (Score:4, Insightful)
"but if it can be automated, why wasn't it before now?"
Two words. "cost effectiveness"
In the United States, investing in a fleet of robots can be cheaper than supporting a hundred workers. In China, you can employ an ARMY of workers, for the investment required for a single robot.
This is the reason so many corporations are moving to China - not to help the Chinese who need jobs, but to make as much profit as possible, for as little investment as possible.
Re:Parallels to the Union movement last century (Score:0, Insightful)
This would work only if all of the developed countries simultaneously applied the tariffs and if the countries with the exploited workers accepted it.
Neither case is likely. If France wanted to impose these tariffs, then companies in another country without these tariffs, such as Germany, would be at a competitive advantage. This would cause the companies that use Foxconn to simply move operations to Germany instead of France. Additionally, the countries with exploited workers have a lot of political power. China, for one, isn't going to let massive tariffs be imposed.
Re:Maths don't matter to reality! (Score:5, Insightful)
These suicides are well within the statistical expectations for a worker population that large. But People don't care about facts, just emotions.
Really? Is it statistically common for groups of people from the same workplace to throw themselves off the same rooftops in large numbers? I mean, keep in mind that these aren't unrelated people slitting their wrists or taking pills.
I'm hardly the first person to make this point, but consider the last time you heard of a rooftop-suicide epidemic at a major corporation. Can't? That's because even given the huge number of people employed by corporations it's an unbelievably rare event. In fact there have been one or two such examples over the past few decades and they were treated as exactly the unusual and horrifying event that they are.
Automating spin (Score:5, Insightful)
automating many parts of its business, a move which could see 800,000 workers lose their jobs.
Why is there always a focus on the negative side of automation? It really means less work, same productivity. Humans no longer need to work as hard to produce the same quality of life.
The difficulty with these stories lies in the fact that it's a redistribution of wealth from the workers to the owners of the company, until those owners redistribute the wealth again by investing the savings. So it's difficult for the people who lose their jobs, as they now have to fight to get new ones. It's sad. But for humanity as a whole, extra efficiency means greater wealth, since we are now creating the same product with less work invested.
It raises everybody up in the long run. Compare medieval kings to lower middle class people of today and we find the kings did not have the amount of entertainment to choose from, the durable clothes, the variety of food available, the health care quality, perks like temperature control of their rooms, etc.
That's the overall and long term effect, the greater positive side, and something that is too often ignored.
Re:So.. factories are *moving* within china (Score:3, Insightful)
>>>You can't transition to a "post-scarcity" economy without putting a few people out of work
What do you feed the machines after the oil wells start to run dry (already in progress), and oil skyrockets to $500 or more per barrel (after 2020)? I wouldn't describe that as post-scarcity.
Aside -
I think the world is overpopulated. I also think that's the prime reason pollution is a problem - we're sitting in our own filth. If the world only had 1 billion (like the year 1800) that problem would disappear.
Re:Parallels to the Union movement last century (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Parallels to the Union movement last century (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Parallels to the Union movement last century (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Parallels to the Union movement last century (Score:4, Insightful)
Followed with...
HUH?!?
Unions solved many of the outrageously dehumanizing conditions created by United States corporations in the past but unions are not the solution to the same dehumanizing conditions in Chinese factories?
I think you were headed in the right direction but then your logic fell off a cliff.
And isolating the United States economy through tariffs? Wrong answer. The majority of the economic growth is taking place outside of the United States, if you isolate us economically thinking it will increase global worker wages and improve conditions you are dead wrong, it will just further destroy the economy in the United States while places like China continue to grow.
Now if you suggested holding United States corporate board members liable for foreign actions that would be considered illegal in the States much like a paedophile trying to continue their illicit practices overseas and then coming home to the States then you might have been on to something. I'm sure Jobs and other CEOs would take much more interest in foreign workers if they faced the possibility of jail time.
Time and again it has been proven that when groups of people stand together against oppression by a few they often succeed in overcoming the tyranny. I find it astounding that in a nation where the people stood up against tyranny by creating a union (The United States of America) it is today considered evil, anti-american, socialist, communist, etc. for the people to stand together in a union against poor wages and working conditions.
I think you are correct that unions were instrumental in improving the plight of the U.S. worker in the past but I would say that today in some cases the U.S. is returning to those conditions before there were unions [youtube.com], and it is not because of China it is because unions are broken by corporations through political attacks, media attacks, and out right illegal activity.
Re:Parallels to the Union movement last century (Score:5, Insightful)
China is as communist as America is capitalist.
Re:Parallels to the Union movement last century (Score:5, Insightful)
I hope you are trolling and, if so, good job. If not, then I don't think you realize that your "proposal" is more extreme than even the most fanatical left wing crazies would dare make these days. Imposing tariffs so that the products make in third world countries which are imported in the USA match the price of those produced in the USA? You do realize that such tariffs would bring instant death to the economies of dozens of developing countries, and that the only reason for the incredible rise in standard of living of ordinary workers in China in the last three decades was due to the fact that they are able to produce and export goods more cheaply than those in the countries who import them? Why else would developed countries import third world goods if by law they cost the same as those locally produced?
Good point. The real question is: why would developed countries deliberately strip themselves of manufacturing capability in order to transfer their wealth to developing countries for the dubious benefit of poorly-made products and the loss of domestic jobs? What you are really saying is that those developing economies are totally dependent upon the United States, and that we have some obligation to maintain what is, effectively, a very costly form of foreign aid. A form that is rapidly destroying our own economy, standard of living, and way of life. We've already borrowed and given away trillions of dollars in aid to other nations, forgiven untold amounts of war debt, and now you believe that it is wrong for us to raise a few trade barriers to protect what little we have left?
Seriously.
Re:Poor Planning (Score:2, Insightful)
I could agree with that concept only if the employee would also have to dip into their savings and pay for the losses the company sees during down turns.
If the concept is not bilateral, then it's broken and will cause too much harm.
Right now, as an employee, you have the option of working somewhere else if the pay isn't good enough for the job you are required to do. Basing pay expectations on profit or markup is the reason why the US government had to bail our GM and the banks. It leads to one sided overpayments with threats of making things worse in times of need for the company.
Re:Poor Planning (Score:5, Insightful)
Some companies do offer 'profit-sharing', but that definitely not the norm.
Of course not.
Rule number one in any Aristocratic system is that you need to suppress the worker class, since otherwise they may start to get strange expectations, like actually getting a greater part of the wealth production that they are actually responsible for.
And if there is one thing you don't want in an Aristocratic system, it is to have those who actual produce the wealth, starting to question those at the top leeching.
Re:Why not move them to the US? (Score:3, Insightful)
And if they would work for $0.50 a day then maybe it might make sense.
When it isn't financially sensible to employ people at $0.50 a day, you can expect the people to be replaced by machines with one or two people watching over them getting paid $2 a day. Factories are going to go where the labor is cheap and where the products can be shipped to customers. Whereever that might be these days.
The industrial revolution, all over again. (Score:3, Insightful)
Nothing changes. In the west we had exploitative companies as well, still have to some degree read up on EA, and we had the same kind of struggles. In the end it seems to have worked itself out maybe mostly because we didn't have silly people from other cultures giving smart remarks from their comfortable lives won by the hard work of others.
Once a woman choose to be tramped to death for the right to vote. Now many women her age can't even be bothered to vote. On a site were the vast majority is upper white middle class with high paying jobs for a minimum of physical labour you have a discussion about how good/bad foxconn is were people work 14+ hour shifts 6-7 days a week. Last time anyone here did an all nighter was to play WoW. In China you do 30+ hours because the boss says so and when you die, nobody is there to sue the hell out of the employer. Here? If the boss gives you a mean look you sue for trauma.
And of course the fact that 99% here have gadgets made by foxconn doesn't in the least inspire a bit of "justification" spell "B-U-L-L-S-H-I-T-T-I-N-G" alone the lines of 'well, any job is better the no job".
Humanity, not found on slashdot.
Re:Rewarding suicide is unwise (Score:5, Insightful)
Pay them a fixed price: their incentive is for you to buy / sell ASAP, good deal or bad.
Pay by the hour: they could milk you forever.
Pay a percentage: buy / sell ASAP, since holding out for a better deal could easily double their work and still only increase their haul by a few percent.
Even in the simple case - a company paying salesman a percentage of what they sell - can easily turn bad for the company through infighting salesmen, lying to customers, and customers with buyer's remorse who won't come back.
Re:So.. factories are *moving* within china (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, it's hard to accuse China of not taking action on that front.
Re:Parallels to the Union movement last century (Score:5, Insightful)
Chinese products are cheaper because the workforce is abused. That's another way of saying that they aren't cheaper at all, Foxxconn has simply managed to succesfully externalize part of the cost to be paid by said Chinese workers rather than buyers. This is bad from the economic standpoint, since it encourages behavior where the total costs are actually greater.
An import tariff for such products is good because it forces the end user to pay for all the costs of the product, thus allowing free market to optimize resource usage. This is also the idea behind carbon credits and other such devices often derided by, ironically enough, free-market fundamentalists.
All computer components should have all of their costs included in their final price, including but not limited to pollution, injuries etc. caused by the operation of the manufacturing plants. If necessary, if for example a factory operates outside US jurisdiction and gains a price advantage by polluting with abandon, tariffs should be used to enforce this.
Failure to do so will result in market failure. You cannot have a free market if everyone can simply steal from others - which is what externalizing costs is really doing. Free markets can only work if you are forced to pay for all the costs of whatever choice you make, and that requires tariff in a world with different jurisdictions.
There are, of course, ethical reasons to stop multinational corporations from killing Chinese workers in the name of profit, but I'm addressing the half of the point which I think might appeal more to the stone-hearted conservatists.
Re:Parallels to the Union movement last century (Score:5, Insightful)
Because being abused in a factory is still better than living in a farm, the same reason why Europeans left farms during the Industrial Revolution to work in factories. The conditions in those factories were still horrible enough that it gave birth to communism.
Of course it did, as technical development always does, but only after the worst abuses had been stopped.
I just explained it to you: it twists the markets and causes them to misoptimize.
No, we don't. The importers of cheap goods benefit in the short term by being able to undercut domestic manufacturers, causing those domestic manufacturers to either go bankrupt or lower their standards of pay and treatment of workforce to match China. This, in turn, causes said workforce to have lower income, which lowers their standard of living unless they take debt, which of course can't happen endlessly. It also makes them dependent on cheap Chinese imports while eating the initial benefits. The end result is economic ruin, which is what has been happening lately.
They build their industries up, we lose them. Also, please understand that pollution doesn't stay in place, it spreads from China to the whole globe, including where we live.
Where do these new jobs come from? Where does this new wealth come from? If our production is done in China, we are paying Chinese to do it, which means that wealth is leaving out economy. We are losing wealth, not gaining it, and lowering wages eat away any benefits from cheaper price of imports. And as people keep getting poorer, it gets harder and harder to start new companies or keep old ones going, since people can't afford your products.
The only ones who benefit from this situation are the heads of multinational corporations. Our economy is very near the point of no return, we have to do something about this problem while we still can.
Re:Parallels to the Union movement last century (Score:3, Insightful)
Sure we lose some of the jobs in a specific industry but we gain more jobs and more wealth overall.
You are seriously understating the seriousness of the issue.
... hemorrhaging them in fact. Where, if not from the manufacture and sale of finished goods to other countries, do you think America's wealth came from? Trees? Our middle class expanded as we became the foremost industrial combine on the planet: now that we've decided to give that up our middle class is shrinking, our economy is destabilizing and our standard of living is falling. Please explain to me, in bite-sized terms, how transferring our manufacturing to China is of even short-term benefit to us. Sure, we get cheap smartphones and big-screen television sets ... but at what cost? You can't measure the damage that's been done to us by the retail price of an electronic toy at Best Buy.
I agreed with most of your post but it was the last line I choked on. You're not applying the same logic to us that you're applying to the {insert favorite developing nation here}. We are not gaining more jobs and wealth overall, we are losing them
There are really only two ways to become wealthy as a nation in this world: build and sell finished goods, or sell your natural resources to other nations. The latter only lasts as long as your mines and oil wells hold out, the former lasts as long as you make the effort to maintain your infrastructure and production capabilities.
For example, take our erstwhile ally, Japan. Japan didn't just compete with us, they decimated a number of key manufacturing sectors of the U.S. economy. And that was one tiny island nation. China, on the other hand, is a vast operation that is hitting us on every front, from cell phones to machine guns, and our government has simply failed to protect us from that onslaught in any significant way. I'm sorry, but the idea that trade barriers are obsolete or inherently wrong is a morally bankrupt position to take, because it means that you are placing the welfare of other countries above your own, other people above your own.
There's a word for people who think like that. But I won't use it here.