Foxconn workers depart company, rather than shift to non-iPhone assembly -- report
Apple partner and device assembler Foxconn is going on a hiring spree at China colleges, but reports from within the company claim that as iPhone 7 manufacturing winds down, assemblers would rather leave than deal with lower pay and fewer safety precautions when building goods from other companies.
Foxconn has kicked off a recruitment drive from 12,000 recent university graduates and 6,000 graduates of senior high schools and junior vocational colleges in China. Ostensibly, the plan is to cultivate engineers for development of new products over time, ultimately nurturing talent in-house.
Foxconn chairman Terry Gou is demanding that graduates should begin with the company at the "lowest level," meaning device manufacture, in order to build knowledge. The recruitment notices claim that new hires can garner a monthly salary of 2400? ($350) immediately, with overtime boosting that to 4,000? ($582) in time. The offered salary is commensurate with other manufacturer's offerings in the area.
Local Chinese media is claiming that the recruitment drive is needed because of employee departure. The primary reason cited for the employee departure, as cited by the local media, is that workers would rather leave than be shifted to a non-Apple product as iPhone 7 lines slow in accordance with seasonality.
Reportedly, protections demanded by Apple for assemblers of its products aren't necessarily extended to employees if they move to another company's products, inducing the departures.
As of late, Foxconn has taken to building "Foxbots" for device assembly, with 60,000 workers known to have been stricken from the company rolls as a result. It is not known how many of the robots are being used to assemble Apple devices.
Foxconn has kicked off a recruitment drive from 12,000 recent university graduates and 6,000 graduates of senior high schools and junior vocational colleges in China. Ostensibly, the plan is to cultivate engineers for development of new products over time, ultimately nurturing talent in-house.
Foxconn chairman Terry Gou is demanding that graduates should begin with the company at the "lowest level," meaning device manufacture, in order to build knowledge. The recruitment notices claim that new hires can garner a monthly salary of 2400? ($350) immediately, with overtime boosting that to 4,000? ($582) in time. The offered salary is commensurate with other manufacturer's offerings in the area.
Local Chinese media is claiming that the recruitment drive is needed because of employee departure. The primary reason cited for the employee departure, as cited by the local media, is that workers would rather leave than be shifted to a non-Apple product as iPhone 7 lines slow in accordance with seasonality.
Reportedly, protections demanded by Apple for assemblers of its products aren't necessarily extended to employees if they move to another company's products, inducing the departures.
As of late, Foxconn has taken to building "Foxbots" for device assembly, with 60,000 workers known to have been stricken from the company rolls as a result. It is not known how many of the robots are being used to assemble Apple devices.
Comments
If people would rather leave than move to another production line then how bad are they? :-(
1. Only stupid people buy Apple products.
2. Apple products are overpriced.
3. Apple uses slave labor.
4. Apple is a monopoly.
5. The Apple tax meme.
6. Apple no longer innovates.
7. Jobs is dead and so is Apple.
8. Apple only survives by using planned obsolescence.
9. Apple intentionally removes features and ports to force people to spend more money, the Greed motive.
10. Every other product on the market is superior to anything Apple makes, a repeat of the “Only stupid people buy Apple products.”
And many, many more.
The problem is other companies who use Foxconn do not care. Dell, HP, Microsoft, Sony, Toshiba, etc all know the same thing but are staying quiet. Why? Because they don't want to pay more to have their products made. They would rather have conditions remain the same.
You are living in an age where China is experiencing its Industrial Age. We went thru it and it took a long time for us to have safe working conditions and fair compensation compared to then. With the culture in China it might take much, much longer for them to evolve and it might end up costing us more to pay for products made there.
China may continue being the location of world class assembly for consumer electronics, but the reality is that they too want to create products with profitable margins, and Apple, among others, is teaching them how. Use the same reasoning on why India wants manufacturing in country. Don't be surprised at China marketing electric vehicles in the U.S. soon.
True story: Back when I used to travel to China for product manufacturing, a supplier we used had almost all manual laborers assembling products. Huge rooms filled with workers as far as you could see hand assembling products for eventual US sale. As they got more business and grew, just over the span of about four years, they replaced nearly all of the hand assembly work with machinery. Massive, clean plants with the very latest multi-million dollar machines. It was a shockingly rapid transition.
The only problem in paying more than the prevailing wage is inflation. If a large number of workers in a particular geographic region earn more, housing, fuel, food and other costs might rise accordingly and the workers would be no better off and possibly worse off. To some extent, we've seen this in places like San Francisco, Palo Alto, Cupertino and environs, where housing prices have become completely absurd (as well as cities like Boston, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, etc.)