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Foxconn May Close Factories In China
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."
All this will do is just move the problem. Unless they thought having to actually give a damn about those workers was a problem.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Killing yourself for financial compensation is a poor long-term business plan.
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
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
These suicides are well within the statistical expectations for a worker population that large. But People don't care about facts, just emotions.
"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.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
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.
Import Tariffs. The United States would charge a tariff on Chinese goods made in factories that were not up to OSHA standards. The inspectors for these standards would be INDEPENDENT people probably chosen from an international pool.
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, 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.
China is as communist as America is capitalist.
I hate printers.
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.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
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.
Well, it's hard to accuse China of not taking action on that front.
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.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
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.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.