Uh oh. It looks like a number of Foxconn workers days in the company are numbered. The founder and chairman of the company, Terry Gou has been reported as saying that Foxconn has plans to replace an unspecified amount of workers with one million robots in three years.
In case you don’t know by now – Foxconn is the manufacturer that manufactures/assembles finished products for Apple, Sony and Nokia devices. Foxconn currently has 10,000 robots and plans to reach 300,000 next year.
With reports of suicides, unhappy workers and explosions happening at Foxconn factories, having an all-robot force might be a good idea. But with around 1.2 million people employed at Foxconn right now, one million robots could cause serious unemployment issues in certain regions, if not in the country of China itself if this trend spreads.
Truth be told, there is also an economic matter that manufacturing plant workers int the west know all too well: as labor cost rise, there is an incentive for companies to turn to robotic automation.
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