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Foxconn's Robot Workforce Now 20,000 Strong
itwbennett writes "Slashdot readers will recall Foxconn's plans to staff its factories with an army of 1 million robot workers to offset rising labor costs. Well, now we have an update on those plans. Speaking at the company's shareholder meeting on Wednesday, Foxconn CEO Terry Gou said that there are 20,000 robotic machines currently at work in Foxconn factories. Ultimately, these robots will replace human assembly workers and 'our [human] workers will then become technicians and engineers,' Gou said."
If the number on man hours per year needed to produce the products I use decreases, then I should get to work less right? Less work for everyone, more free time and the same amount of Chinese electronics! A higher percent of the money then goes to research and development, where most of the people can be employed, but work less hours. I'm looking forward to working 10 hours a week!
More free time for everyone means more cool projects, more web comics, more opens source software, more political involvement, more educated people, and even time to really think! More time to make you own food, raise your own kids, and other things that add even more efficiency and thus further reductions in hours to work!
How I wish that were true. I'd gladly work 1/2 time for 1/3 pay as it is (I'd love to share my job with the unemployed, but I can't). If stuff gets more affordable, working 40 hours a week is going to be even more overkill. If it didn't suck so much to be unemployed in the US (say we provided at least what we give the prisoners: food, shelter, and healthcare), I'd be happy to take time off work without fear I'd get stuck jobless. Our economy is kinda messed up.
" but why should Foxconn worry that they will be unemployed?" ...because it shows Foxconn for what it is, a completely apathetic company who only views it's workforce as meat robots, and because those meat robots have real human traits like the need dignity and hope for a semi-decent life, we're going to throw them on the scrap heap. I mean lets face it, when you're working conditions are so bad that a percentage of your workers view death as a plausible means of escape and you're putting up nets to stop them from killing themselves, then maybe it's time to reflect on how your business is treating it's workers. Personally speaking I'd like to see Foxconn execs live for one year; hell, one month under the conditions they force everyone else to endure... but strip away their fortunes first so they can't escape to that magical place of "I'll have my old life of ease to go back to once this hell is done."
China had a ruthlessly exploited work force not seen since the early industrial age.
That is because China never had an industrial age due to a mixture of foreign imperialism, warlord battles, and Communist Party control. Instead tens of millions to people starved to death during the Great Leap Forward, and most people in China were barely eeking out an existence in communal farming until the 1980's. Rather than live on the edge with no hope in the countryside, rural Chinese quickly moved to the cities to work in the factories. The early factories were very capital-poor and had low productivity, thus the only way they could compete for world trade was to have low labor costs. Now Chinese factory capital investment is rising, productivity is rising, along with wages.
Foxconn has no choice. If another company's cost of manufacturing a gadget are lower, then that's where the production will go. Anyway, increasing production efficiency is always a good thing. That's where all human progress comes from. The biggest improvements in population, lifespan, quality of life and human condition in general, the agricultural revolution and the industrial revolution, were both based on the ability to have fewer people do the work that used to take many.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
Where do you find 1 million gainful jobs to replace all of the inefficient human labor they're replacing?
I don't mean to be trite but the answer is, with other companies doing other things. Believe it or not seeing China beginning to automate production is a very positive sign for Chinese workers because it means that pay rates are increasing. If you have unlimited low cost labor there is no point in automating many tasks. But wages in China have been steadily rising to the point where China is now sometimes not competitive with other places. That means they will have to begin to automate some work to remain competitive. Automation being installed is an indicator of rising wages. I'm not even slightly exaggerating when I say it means that millions of people are being pulled out of poverty.
I see this logical fallacy again and again that replacing labor with automation is a zero sum game. It demonstrably is not. The computer you are reading this on has replaced millions of clerical workers who now do other things. Automation replaces some labor but frees it to do more than it could before. Washing clothes used to be a hugely time consuming task but we developed tools (automation) to wash for us and we spend our time on other things. Is it better that we spend our time having people type things repeatedly on typewriters or should we use a word processor and print it once? It isn't that there is suddenly no work, it's that now people have time to accomplish tasks that there wasn't time to accomplish before.