The Global Sociology Blog

It just so happens that as I mentioned Foxconn in my previous post, that company popped up in The Precariat:

“Foxconn, the world’s largest contract manufacturer, epitomises the connivance of multinationals in the abuses in the industrial parks that have sprung up in China. A subsidiary of Taiwan’s Hon PHai [Thanks, Jonathan] Precision Industry Company, it employs 900,000 people in China. Half are in ‘Foxconn City’ in Shenzhen, with its fifteen-storey manufacturing buildings, each dedicated to one customer such as Apple, Dell, HP, Nintendo and Sony. Foxconn City expanded by using a strategy of hiring rural-urban migrants for pitifully low ages, expecting labour turnover of 30-40 per cent a year as successive cohorts burnt themselves out.

Its working arrangements helped increase the global precariat. The low wages and labour intensity (including 36 hours of overtime a month), belatedly brought to the world’s attention by a spate of suicides and attempted suicides and in 2009 and 2010, forced firms elsewhere to try to compete by cutting wages and opting for flexible labour.

Those suicides had an effect. Following adverse publicity and unofficial strikes, Foxconn raised wages. But one outcome will be cuts in free lodging and food as well as in the extensive recreation facilities. The immediate reaction of Foxconn to the suicides was paternalistic. It surrounded its building with nets to catch people if they jumped, hired counsellors for distressed workers, brought in Buddhist monks to calm them and considered asking employees to sign ‘no suicide’ pledge notes. Silicon Valley celebrities in California expressed concern. But they had no reason for surprise. They had made billions of dollars from the ridiculously low-cost products.

Foxconn is a metaphor for globalisation. It will change its model, raising wages in its primary zone, cutting enterprise benefits, moving more production to lower cost areas and shifting to more precarious employees. The great engine of outsourcing will outsource itself. However, Foxconn and the Chinese development model have accelerated changes in the rest of the world to a structure in which the precariat will become the centre of attention.”

Guy Standing (2011), The Precariat: the New Dangerous Class, Bloomsbury, NY, 28-9.

Looks like Foxconn solved its labor problem.