Robots don’t complain Or demand higher wages, or kill themselves
8th August 2011
The Economist continues on its social-democratic way.
WITH more than 1m workers, Foxconn may be China’s largest private employer. The secretive electronics giant is renowned for taking designs from Western firms, such as Apple, and using cheap labour to crank them out in huge quantities. But its fantastically successful business model seems to have run its course.
Primarily because of pressure from Euopean and American ‘progressives’ who aren’t satisfied until every country in the world has to deal with the same politically-motivated government-mandated shackles on business from which the rest of us suffer.
At a closed retreat in late July, Terry Gou, the chief executive of the Taiwanese-owned company (which is also known as Hon Hai), unveiled a plan to hire 1m robots by 2013. In a public statement, Foxconn talked about moving its human workers “higher up the value chain” and into sexy fields such as research. But at least some will surely lose their jobs.
Thanks to pressure from etc. First they bitch about how workers are treated, then they bitch when workers lose the jobs that treated them that way. Truly, there’s no pleasing some people.
To pacify its increasingly restive workers, Foxconn has repeatedly bumped up their wages, improved facilities, provided counselling and swathed its factories with nets to catch anyone leaping from a window. All this costs money.
More accurately, to pacify its increasingly restive foreign critics. The implicit subtext here is that satisfying ‘progressive’ complaints always costs money, lots of it, and the more it costs, the more cost-effective robots become. ‘Progressives’ are the primary drivers of unemployment, pushing an agenda that ultimately makes manual labor unaffordable. As costs go up, demand goes down — that’s the elementary fact of life that ‘progressives’ refuse to acknowledge.