Should the USA become more of a Foxconn nation?

[Karmadillo]

The article points out Americans want to see their kids play soccer on the weekend, live in their own homes, and be paid a decent wage. Maybe that's asking too much. Kids can play soccer without an audience (when they're not working), dormitories are good enough for college students, maybe they're good enough for adults, and isn't a job without a decent wage better than no job at all?

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/business/apple-america-and-a-squeezed-middle-class.html?_r=2&ref=charlesduhigg&pagewanted=all

<edit>

The facility has 230,000 employees, many working six days a week, often spending up to 12 hours a day at the plant. Over a quarter of Foxconn’s work force lives in company barracks and many workers earn less than $17 a day. When one Apple executive arrived during a shift change, his car was stuck in a river of employees streaming past. “The scale is unimaginable,” he said.

Foxconn employs nearly 300 guards to direct foot traffic so workers are not crushed in doorway bottlenecks. The facility’s central kitchen cooks an average of three tons of pork and 13 tons of rice a day. While factories are spotless, the air inside nearby teahouses is hazy with the smoke and stench of cigarettes.

Foxconn Technology has dozens of facilities in Asia and Eastern Europe, and in Mexico and Brazil, and it assembles an estimated 40 percent of the world’s consumer electronics for customers like Amazon, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Motorola, Nintendo, Nokia, Samsung and Sony.

“They could hire 3,000 people overnight,” said Jennifer Rigoni, who was Apple’s worldwide supply demand manager until 2010, but declined to discuss specifics of her work. “What U.S. plant can find 3,000 people overnight and convince them to live in dorms?”

more...

[Scuba]

1. How much would an IPhone cost if Apple paid a US-standard "living wage" but didn't bank $55Billion?

[tridim]

4. Depends if Apple Inc maintains its insane 60%+ profit margin..

And continues to hoard those profits in order to enrich their top brass and the banks.

[Democrats_win]

2. And there aren't that many suicides now that they installed the new netting to catch jumpers

[dkf]

3. Without speaking to the conditions even, is the average American capable of doing the same

Thing repetitively 60 times an hour, 8 hours a day, 5 days a week for 30 years?

Isn't it the monotony that would drive us crazy? At least a fast food job has more variety than that.

[think]

5. True. And the Chinese people should not have to endure this either. It's greed

corruption and the inability to create an independent union that allows FoxCommunists to treat their employees like "Animals" (Bold is used by me for emphasis):

“Hon Hai has a workforce of over one million and as human beings are also animals, to manage one million animals gives me a headache,” said Terry Gou, chairman of Taiwan’s Hon Hai, the parent company of Foxconn.

This was his statement at the end of year party, and considering recent events in Foxconn; Gou picked a regrettable choice of words.

Unfortunately, what could just be poor wording is made much worse by the fact that he also suggested he wanted to learn management techniques from Chin Shin-Chien, director of Tapei Zoo.

To make matters worse, he invited Chin to speak and asked his general managers to listen to his advice, as well as inviting him to take part in his company’s annual review.

full article:

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/asia/foxconn-chairman-compares-his-workforce-to-8216animals/776

[snagglepuss]

7. Are you implying that Chinese workers are less human than American workers? What evidence

do you have that they are not being being driven insane?

[dkf]

8. They are being driven insane, that is why they commit suicide.

But Chinese people are tough...much more driven and resilient than the average American from what I have seen. Americans as a whole are pretty soft. That's why we can't do farm work.

[raouldukelives]

6. Feels like the natural progression

When I look back over the changes of the last 30 odd years I don't see a nation headed toward more liberty, justice & freedom. Our destiny is to become another shell in the global stock market with a workforce to be exploited and natural resources to plunder.
They'll destroy and cut-off the wilderness in measures unthinkable today, force the majority of the people towards major cities and the manufacturing centers and ramp up the endless wars for Wall St as an economy booster & Patriotism meter.
Or something will change and we'll all be happy as larks.

[IDemo]

9. They are also planning to replace a large number of those workers with robots

How Foxconn’s Million-Machine ‘Robot Kingdom’ Will Change the Face of Manufacturing

Foxconn, pressured by the stresses of rising labor costs and negative media attention over employee suicides, could be reshaping the landscape of manufacturing forever. How?

According to Focus Taiwan, the company recently announced it was building a $223 million “robot kingdom” in the Central Taiwan Science Park in the Taiwanese city of Taichung. The research and development center and manufacturing hub is part of chairman Terry Gou’s ambitious plan to build one million industrial robots.

Let’s put that in perspective; according to a September report by the International Federation of Robotics (IFR), the world is on track to reach 1.3 million operating industrial robots by 2014. That means that if Foxconn’s parent company, Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., reaches its goals, it would effectively double the number of industrial robots worldwide.

Foxconn, one of Apple’s biggest suppliers, has a number of good reasons to go the robot route. First, there are the suicides; at least 17 people have killed themselves at Foxconn factories over the last half-decade, according to a special report from Wired. Foxconn’s initial responses seemed a bit crass; first it looked to stop people from jumping off buildings by putting up nets, then it reportedly made workers sign pledges stating that they wouldn’t commit suicide.

http://techland.time.com/2011/11/09/how-foxconns-million-machine-robot-kingdom-will-change-the-face-of-manufacturing/

[meow2u3]

10. Why can't we demand that big companies take a profit margin cut?

It's high time we quit demanding that America become another China, overworking people and paying them what amounts to slave wages.

I'm sick of sociopath corporations treating American workers as if they were spoiled brats simply because they demand that their bosses treat them like the human beings they are, replete with human dignity, instead of disposable tools for profit. This pisses me off to no end!

[pampango]

11. No, a German-type nation would be much better. Higher wages and better benefits. n/t

[Starry Messenger]

12. That whole article made me ill.

So Steve Jobs didn't know enough about glass to design a proper scratch-proof face on the iPhone and that's why he had to ship jobs overseas? If true then he was stupid as well as greedy. Any watchmaker or optometrist could have told him about glass in time to prevent "needing" an insanely short turnaround time to fix a problem created by his own lack of knowledge.

At any rate, it's all bs anyway. The reason the company wants to keep labor and manufacturing costs basement low is for the munificent return of profit it creates for their stockholders and top paid employees. The article says in black and white that the iPhone would cost $65 more if workers were paid American wages. That's not pennies but not much much more considering what they already charge for the phone. What are the real costs of producing a single iPhone, under $100 I'm guessing. The bulk of the difference one pays between the actual cost of producing the phone and the price one pays for it is not being plowed back to the workers. If wages were raised, the stockholders would scream. That's it in a nutshell.

[Eid Ma Clack Shaw]

13. Blame the corporations if you want, but it's ultimately the responsibility of government

to introduce a system that incentivises a return to Western shores. Unfortunately, the system in place benefits the status quo too greatly and barring the introduction of fines for employing oversees workers to do unskilled jobs that could be performed at home or tax breaks for meeting domestic employment quotas, it's not going to happen. It couldn't happen, because, frankly, such a drastic overhaul of the rights corporations have would never, ever jive with congress.

The horse has bolted, the writing was on the wall over 30 years ago. Short of time travel it's hard to see a realistic solution. I can't blame the companies for taking advantage of cheaper labour in order to remain on top, the real fault is with the government(s) who let the rot set in. That's untethered, unregulated capitalism for you.

By the way, I think an iPhone 4S costs about $190 to manufacture. With that said, I believe that is purely the build cost - R&D, transportation and so on is not included.

[Starry Messenger]

14. I blame the entire system. I'm an anti-capitalist.

As you said yourself "It couldn't happen, because, frankly, such a drastic overhaul of the rights corporations have would never, ever jive with congress." So even if I blame the government, they are also hip deep in propping up the same process. So, our options are limited. We can try to keep electing people who might lay some responsibilities on the corporations--can we do this fast enough to keep the corporations from stripping away jobs and prosperity in our country?

We can try, but it doesn't seem to work well enough to keep workers here from becoming "useless" and not being able to help themselves and their families. Not saying though, that I don't work to try this angle. Any little bit would help.

As a socialist, I put the bulk of my energy in thinking of ways to overhaul the whole system, so our human lives are not wasted keeping the precarious plates all spinning at once, for an economy that benefits very few of us who produce the wealth for it.


"I can't blame the companies for taking advantage of cheaper labour in order to remain on top": I propose that we redefine what "on top" is to actually make sense for more humans. There's a lot to unpack in that one phrase "on top". What if we had a system where "on top" meant that all the families that worked for you could have a living wage, not live in dorms like ants, and didn't produce workers that couldn't afford the product that they made, eventually leading to a shrinking of the customer base and over-production of the product and a saturated market? Leading to a loss of stock value and needing to lay off workers, etc? That would be a system that I would praise and not blame.