Riot breaks out at Foxconn's Taiyuan plant

http://www.engadget.com/2012/09/23/foxconn-taiyuan-riot/

by llambda • 14 years ago

99 54 14 years ago

FredericJ• 14 years ago

Will the iPhone 5 production be affected ? Probably I guess

shimon_e11• 14 years ago

No. If any affect was caused it would be made up with overtime in the next shift. If they need to they would pay bonuses. The few dollars extra verses a loss in sales due to no stock in stores...

geori• 14 years ago

Steve would never have let this happen.

samstave• 14 years ago

Meaning he would never let this news hit the media?

hmottestad• 14 years ago

The whole Foxconn world reminds me of history lessons at primary school where we learned about the industrial revolution in the UK. Back then whole families lived and worked at a factory, the children too, before the onset of child labor laws.

Then one after the other factories became more machine centric and less labor intensive before they started moving east and the west became richer and less dependent on creating physical products.

Now we have become acclimatized to cheap production in the east at a time of great segregation between the rich and the poor. And protests and riots will have to continue until we realize that our luxury lives are still dependent on 10, 100, maybe 1000 other people who have to live in poverty.

ktizo8• 14 years ago

Also when we outsource jobs to other countries, presumably given that the point of doing so is that they have a lower cost of living, therefore the company saves money. So presumably they could be paid and treated really well and would still be a lot cheaper.

It is one thing to move production to save money from wage differences, and quite another to then turn a blind eye to the working conditions of your new employees under the guise of it being the suppliers problem.

Also, it is worth remembering that although Apple is a major customer of Foxconn's and has some of the most leverage with them (which is why it is really is worth annoying Apple about this), they are hardly the only people who make use of Foxconn and that there are also a lot worse places than Foxconn that do not have such a strong light shone upon them, and that are usually forgotten quickly even when they make the news.

shimon_e11• 14 years ago

The Chinese have a mob mentality. They themselves don't even know what they are rioting about, most the time. The internet is learning that it is about an accident in between a guard and a worker at 10pm. Trust me, the internet is learning this fact before a majority of the rioters are. If you can really call them rioters, as it is more like a 2000 man parade with about 5 people actually rioting (see the video). No one is in uniform so it is safe to assume these are off shift workers.

The last riot at Foxconn started with a dispute in between a worker and a local restaurant owner. Ended with a 1000 man riot. Nothing to do with Foxconn worker rights.

Such riots can't be equivocated with workers flighting for greater rights. They aren't. They want more money. Most the disputes are about broken promises of overtime work, as the workers make their best money from overtime. The workers don't live anywhere near the factories. They just work there for a few years to take money back to the villages where their families and friends live. They want money to improve families living conditions, not the factory that they don't give a damn about. They would trade factory conditions for more money almost any time, as the factory conditions are just temporary for them. They want to reach their goal of saving $X, go home, and enjoy their lives with their family and friends.

What I am saying is not universal in China. The Chinese government controls migration and in some locations factories can only employ local people. In such factories labour costs are much higher and workers do receive much better working conditions. This story is not about such a factory.

mc322• 14 years ago

My feeling is that without a dedicated world body with the force of law behind it like a "Bern Convention" but for labor, what you are proposing is fantastic.

It's as if one might expect people who buy a burger from McDonald's to go ahead and give the half way difference between what a burger costs at McDonald's and a Gourment burger joint (assuming McD pays its employees around minimum wage and the Gourment joint pays more) to McD's workers "to be fair".

If China feels it's in its interest not to bolster its labor laws and not to vigorously enforce those it has, then leaving it up to individual companies to unilaterally take up the good cause is not an effective policy. The central government could fix all these issues, but it feels they are subservient to other issues. Mandating higher wages risks making automation more attractive which would dispossess these marginal workers. Foxconn as it is, is exploring this alternative as they witness wage inflation.

Why would Volkswagen, Toyota, Dell, Hitachi, Samsung, even Huawei, etc., unilaterally require that their OEMs pay their (OEMs's not actually the foreign firms's) employees any more than they do when doing so would put them at a disadvantage vis a vis other OEMs and those customers who do not pay higher wages? Let's say Acer picked up the good cause but no one else did, Acer would eventually lose to the others due to higher costs. It's not as though the OEMs and their customers need to compete for labor.

shimon_e11• 14 years ago

Chinese factory labour is a very different demographic to what the west had. A majority of Chinese factories workers come from China's 50% rural population where the children are raised by the grandparents in exchange for ~30% of the parents salaries. As in, the first generation raises the third generation in the villages, while the second works in the cities. Chinese life is very different to what most westerns are familiar with.

mc322• 14 years ago

AFAIK, the mentality of quite a few mainlanders is long-term. In other words, one generation is willing to put in the downpayment for the next or the one after that such that one generation is willing to put up with sacrifice if there is evidence for prosperity for the next. (This was exaggeratedly exemplified by Mao's "we don't care if we lose 300 million, our women will make it up in one generation".)

For example, moms and dads riding rickety bikes to and fro work, etc. rather than buying a car on credit or taking hand-me-downs without second thoughts from relatives and so on and using the saved money instead to put their children thru school or pay for after school cram schools. Not to say that doesn't happen in North America, but here it's more exceptional than in China, as far as I could tell.

azernik• 14 years ago

Maybe now that's very different from what Westerners are familiar with, but during the West's Industrial Revolution the demographic story of factory labor was also about the rural-to-urban migration of that "second generation".

ChuckMcM4• 14 years ago

Well the circumstances have remarkable similarities. Much of China's economic growth has been attributed to underpaid agricultural labor becoming better paid factory labor. (still underpaid but less so perhaps). That raises the amount of disposable income people have which raises their standard of living.

The next chapter in this book are unions (well that was the chapter that followed urban migration in many other countries) where the workers, demanding a fair wage for their work strike and stop production. This chapter can't start until there aren't enough underpaid agri-workers to fill the positions, but once there are, look out.

How all of that plays out in a totalitarian regime is not well understood at all. In the US and elsewhere the folks to took union organizers out behind a shed and shot them were eventually brought to justice and punished, enough so that the practice became too risky for the factories. It has been suggested that in highly corrupt or complicit governments that correcting force (justice for organizers against being shot) may prevent the formation of effective unions. And how that plays out on the world scene is even less well known since Europe and the US went through the union chapter when there wasn't instantaneous communication around the world.

Interesting times indeed.

rz2k• 14 years ago

Polish Solidarity in the 1980s operated in a similar situation, and their work was too economically vital, and political authority was just shy of being strong enough.

The Chinese leadership is aware that the basis of its continued legitimacy the miracle of well over 600 million people being lifted out of poverty since 1980. (A humanitarian achievement that arguably rivals any other in history)

Whether it is violent crackdowns on dissent or widespread work stoppages, the economic fallout would threaten that narrative.

Though cheap labor is an advantage over other manufacturing centers, it is the incredible size that creates the flexibility to immediately scale up production on short notice that might make these super factories stand out even more to clients. If that is the case, until factories of the same magnitude are built in countries with even cheaper labor, there may be room for significant wage growth among the workers.

shimon_e11• 14 years ago

How are they underpaid? Are you suggesting they would be making more money fulfilling a local economic need with similar skills and risks? China's economic growth is due to an oversupply of unskilled labour that are able to be trained at a cheaper cost than western automation.

Read up how BYD started up. It is very enlightening. The west had modern battery factories yet couldn't compete with BYD on the price of it's hand made batteries.

rickdale• 14 years ago

It's amazing the news about this riot has spread the way it has. It's common practice in China to limit the number of workers from each village in order to differ congregations of people and suppress acts like rioting. I have heard of protests when the factories are closed and no one is listening, but ultimately news about protests is usually limited. This must be a big one.

shimon_e11• 14 years ago

Chinese riots are like Chinese night clubs. Boring and dull.

Example: Anti-Japan riots. 1000s of Chinese. One Lexus. Barely any damage even using hammers. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKnuILXFVZI&feature=relat...

scarmig2• 14 years ago

This is a very relevant and timely essay:

http://jacobinmag.com/2012/08/china-in-revolt/

Extremely interesting, especially if you enjoy reading left perspectives on global labor issues. The tldr of it is that Chinese workers aren't simply exploited, culturally-destined to obedience, and at the mercies of Western oligarchs and do-gooders: they're actively molding and negotiating their own rights and fates, though they still face their own unique challenges.

keithpeter• 14 years ago

"Minimum wages are going up by double digits in cities around the country and many workers are receiving social insurance payments for the first time." - from linked article

The article linked to by parent is interesting, although the vocabulary is leftist.

You know how Western economies generate around 70 to 80% of gdp from activity within their borders (exceptions being Canada and NZ because of extraction industries). When China gets near that percentage, will they need this cheap assembly and fabrication work?

Flam• 14 years ago

How easy it would be to fly in, secretly meet with dozens of these employees, tell them to spread the word that if they riot they will each get a sum of money, and watch the bad publicity grow.

shimon_e11• 14 years ago

According to the latest reports surfacing it started with a fight in between 10 workers from different production lines involving a guard somehow. It is already mid day in China and no one know what the exact story is.

Maybe more accurate to call this a group fight with a few thousand spectators. Like I said earlier comments earlier most people seemed to be pretty calm.

jdietrich• 14 years ago

As always, it is necessary to point out that Foxconn has 1.2 million employees, most of whom live in company-owned accommodation. Foxconn's HR issues are in many ways better understood by regarding them as a small country rather than a company. With a population of 1.2 million, all sorts of very unusual things become statistical inevitabilities. By any reasonable measure, Foxconn is in fact exceptionally safe and peaceful.

On the topic of whether Foxconn workers are underpaid, they are clearly not - they perform work of exceptionally low value, most of which is performed by hand for no reason other than that Chinese peasants are cheaper than machines. Foxconn operates on very low margins and earns only a tiny fraction of the retail price of the devices they manufacture. The value in consumer electronics is primarily R&D; Without the investment of hundreds of billions of dollars in microelectronics research, these workers would still be peasants and their American and European counterparts would be working 10-hour shifts manufacturing vacuum tubes and phonograph needles.

Riot breaks out at Foxconn's Taiyuan plant

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