Foxconn To Employ 1 Million Robots 372
hackingbear writes "Taiwanese technology giant Foxconn will replace some of its workers with 1 million robots in three years to cut rising labor expenses and improve efficiency. Foxconn, the world's largest maker of computer components, which assembles products for Apple, Sony and Nokia, employing 1 million (human) laborers in mainland China, is in the spotlight after a string of suicides of workers at its massive Chinese plants. As labor regulations tighten up in China, human laborers demanding wage rises become replaceable."
Re:Well. (Score:5, Insightful)
Many of us on the left have long argued that socialism was the only way to deal with the consequences of rising productivity and automation: that in a world in which we have permanently moved beyond labor scarcity, the current system is unworkable.
Re:So Let Me Get This Straight... (Score:5, Insightful)
it's still cheaper to maintain the robots in china, and it's still easier to dodge environmental rules in china, and it's still growing like crazy and the main target market for what you're making in the next few years.
And the chinese don't have two political parties playing chicken with government spending over debt that could be easily raised, budgets that could be easily put on a path to remedy and so on.
Oh and in china you don't need to provide healthcare, and wouldn't want to anyway, since if your employees die due to disease you don't need to replace them and no one will do anything if you don't try to help.
Re:So Let Me Get This Straight... (Score:2, Insightful)
Cutting corners on paychecks and forcing workers to work/live in squalid conditions carries a stiffer price when you do it at home. When it's brown people halfway across the world, even slightly less inexpensive brown people, if human rights groups go in and see problems you can at least promise "a full investigation" and to hold your supply chain "more accountable". In the end it's about separating yourself from your labor to maintain plausible deniability.
Re:Robots problems (Score:2, Insightful)
statistically, working at FC is no more suicideagenic than being Chinese.
Interesting, but irrelevant.
"being Chinese" is not the peer group a reasonable study would compare Foxconn works too.
You'd look at factory workers doing similar jobs.
And unlike the general Chinese population, the workers at Foxconn are killing themselves specifically because of the shitty conditions at Foxconn.
Re:So Let Me Get This Straight... (Score:5, Insightful)
Those "brown people" have never lived better in Chinese history.
Westerners see anything less than their (current, RECENT) luxury as slavery. China was a smoking ruin within living memory. Warlordism, the Japanese invasion, massive famines, etc aren't ancient history.
Re:Peak Employment? (Score:4, Insightful)
almost all manufacturing is much better done if the workers are free to engineer the repetitive human work out of the equation. however, the number of "robots" is irrelevant, which parts they do isn't irrelevant though. unions for large parts try to stop this, as for many workers the aim is to just do the same shift over and over again until they die.
I mean, you can pound metal with a hammer, or have a machine hammer pounding which is massively better way to do it than with human muscle. similarly you can solder with a machine massively better than by doing it by hand and place components on the boards with machines better and even the assembly stage you can do better if you automate it somehow. however what's good with human workers is that you can start assembling as soon as you get the parts, but you can in no way compete with a more automated, better engineered assembly line with them(this is one thing Ford never understood properly and one thing why gm has been repeatedly put on the brink of bankruptcy and beyond by Japanese and European manufacturers).
humanoid robots would be for most things be just an intermediate solution, so saying "1 million robots" means actually pretty much nothing, and they don't know yet what they're going to manufacture anyways.
anyhow, peak employment died when we started building tractors and created an abundance of food. only a very little slice of western society is in any way related to what's necessary for survival, the rest is just people trying to convince others that they're providing a service worth paying for and which could be called a job.
Re:So Let Me Get This Straight... (Score:5, Insightful)
Translation: China is anti-human rights while America is full of constitutionalists who protect self-evident unalienable rights.
Re:So Let Me Get This Straight... (Score:5, Insightful)
fixed that for you.
Re:Peak Employment? (Score:4, Insightful)
The easiest and least inequitable way to solve the problem is to simply reduce working hours (which would, incidentally, make it a lot easier to manage retirement problems as well, as it's easier to keep people working if they work a lot less).
Ultimately, as production capacity vastly outstrips demand, you only have two realistic choices: divide the product of the labour or divide the labour. I'd certainly prefer the latter.
Re:Short term pain for long term pain? (Score:5, Insightful)
You need to look a bit further back in history to see when we shot ourselves in the head. Back in the 70s and 80s when robotics first began to be introduced into manufacturing, there was considerable resistance to it in the West because it displaced blue collar workers. We prioritized their jobs over market efficiency. Consequently in the 90s and 00s when a certain country stepped forward who was willing to play hardball in the labor market, a lot of those jobs ended up moving over there.
If we'd opted for efficiency over jobs in the 70s and 80s and pressed full speed ahead with automated assembly lines, the cost of robotic labor in the West might have been low enough to compete with human labor in China. Those manufacturing industries might have been able to stay here, along with jobs operating and maintaining those automated manufacturing facilities. This is the risk you take when you prioritize anything over efficiency - that someone else will swoop in with a less costly and/or more efficient process and steal all your business from you.
Foxconn is now shielding themselves so another developing country cannot do to them what they did to the West. If they stuck with human labor as we did, as their wages rose another developing country could undercut their labor prices and steal business from them. To prevent this, they're getting the robots in place now. That'll make it difficult or impossible for another developing country to undercut their manufacturing costs, thus guaranteeing those manufacturing industries stay put in China.
They see the writing on the wall when it comes to mundane, repetitive tasks performed by humans. The inexorable march of progress in AI and robotics means that long-term, blue collar manufacturing jobs worldwide are a dead end. It may take 30 years, it may take 100+ years, but the inevitable outcome is that all manufacturing labor will be done by machines, not people. It's simply a waste of our time to be doing such mundane tasks. This should have been obvious in the 70s. We should have embraced automation back then and set up re-education programs to teach assembly line workers how to operate and maintain the robots. Then maybe those manufacturing industries might never have moved over to China in the first place.
Re:So Let Me Get This Straight... (Score:4, Insightful)
I agree with breaking the ties between the military-industrial complex and government, but if you CUT federal salaries I don't see how you can manage to keep any competent employees. You already make about twice as much by working in private industry.
Members of congress make less than $200k per year. Their campaigns (admittedly not out of their own pockets) cost millions of dollars, and most of them were millionaires before running. And anyway, eliminating their salaries completely would pay for about 15 minutes in Iraq.
Guarding your pocket change is pointless when big business has the key to your safe.
Re:So Let Me Get This Straight... (Score:5, Insightful)
No, China is pro-business ... and America is pro-rich. No one is terribly interested in putting business out of business as a goal in and of itself, but if it drives 1% more wealth to the top 0.1% in the short term the US will do it.
If you want to see socialism in action look at Sweden, if you want to see capitalism in action look at China, if you want to see money captured politics in action look at the US and the EU.
Re:So Let Me Get This Straight... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Peak Employment? (Score:4, Insightful)
> Seems like there will always be a need for humans in the chain, no matter how technologically advanced things get.
Perhaps, but that need is decreasing all the time.
Few hundred years ago pretty much everyone was working in farming and forest industry. Now one man with a harvester can cut down a whole forest. And a couple of people with fully automatic milking robots can take care of hundreds of cows.
And when I was a kid I used to buy train tickets from a person. Now I buy those from a machine.
When programming was just born profession, programmers had assistant to write the code to a punch card. Nowadays those assistants are not needed as code is typed directly into computers.
Re:So Let Me Get This Straight... (Score:2, Insightful)
lolll...is compartmentalized capitalism focused on advancing the interests of the state. The PRC has this trick: You can make yourselves wealthy, but if you attempt to make yourself wealthy at the expense of the state as they do in the U.S. and E.U., then you're fitted with some of that uniquely Chinese jewelry: A bullet behind the ear.
It would seem that exploitation knows nothing about language, the state or economic systems.
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Re:So Let Me Get This Straight... (Score:2, Insightful)
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