Foxconn to Replace Half a Million Employees with Robots

For more news visit ☛ http://english.ntdtv.com
Follow us on Twitter ☛ http://twitter.com/NTDTelevision
Add us on Facebook ☛ http://facebook.com/NTDTelevision

Taiwan's IT giant Foxconn announced it plans to replace up to half a million human workers with robots in the next three years. This comes after the company has been troubled with a series of employee suicides.

Foxconn is currently the world's largest manufacturer of computer components— assembling products for Apple, Sony and Nokia.

Currently 10-thousand robots paint, weld and assemble things for Foxconn. The company announced at an event in Shenzhen, they plan to increase that number to 300-thousand next year and to one million in 2014.

Foxconn spokesmen could not be reached for comment.

Last year, a total of at least 14 Foxconn employees committed suicide, mostly in the company's plant in China's southern city of Shenzhen. Activists blame Foxconn for poor working conditions.

Category:

News & Politics

Tags:

• NTDTV
• NTD
• china news
• china
• foxconn
• replacement
• employees
• robots
• workers
• suicides
• working conditions
• manufacturer

[TheZoonib]

Just wait Chinese robots will be committing suicide due to bad working conditions.

[haulpartnett]

bloody robots! comin over here! stealing our jobs!

robots go home

[dimithryv]

they tuk urrrrrrr jurrrrrrs

[trugangsta4real]

THEY CAN ALL GET JOBS BUILDING THE ROBOTS!!

[AColonDashSix]

Their jobs are so depressing and repetitive worker suicide has it's own department in HR, now their losing those jobs to robots? I guess robots are even better than dehumanized people.

Man that's just ... just ... actually it's kinda funny lol

[luciduspostremo]

Do the math. 14 suicides a year in the community of 300 000 people equals a suicide percentage of approx. 0.3 (with an average lifetime of 70 years). In China as a whole, the suicide percentage is over 1 %. Now, differences in the ages of people commiting suicide does ha something to say, as the foxconn workforce is young of age, but as a whole the suicide trend there isnt that bad.

I'm generally sceptic to much that happens in China, but you have to be objective about each individual case...

[GG4S3xTo]

@motionapplied STFU dude you're a fucking foxconn rep. Your account is a shame, and you're no American.

[shoshenkis]

@motionapplied You have a point there

[ichidanmasters]

Alternatively, they can open up factories in India, or in Africa, where labor costs are lower. But eventually, there'll come in a point (in a few decade's time), when living standards even in the poorest parts of the world are such that the cost of such consumer electronics would become too prohibitive for all apart from the elites. So increased automation is the only eventuality.

Outsourcing manufacturing to China 30-50 years ago was only a stop-gap.

Read Robotic Nation.

[ichidanmasters]

Suicide rate in china is 20 per 100,000 people. Foxconn is a very large company. I wonder how much of this can be attributed just to the general propensity of humans to commit suicide, especially ones doing a very boring job.

Anyway that goes away from the point. The point here is that as China's economy increases, so does it's minimum wage (eventually), and in order to remain competitive and keep our iPhones nice and cheap, we need cheaper labor, and that's where robots come in.