About Foxconn

(The image is a screen grab from the trailer of the 2004 Will Smith film “I, Robot,” which I obviously selected tongue-in-cheek. Real robots used in the assembly of electronics look more like the one assembling cell phone speakers in the video below from a Florida-based company called AccuPlace.)By now most people who know anything about the world of consumer electronics knows that most of the gadgets they love — their iPads, iPhones, Android tablets and so on — are made in China in huge factories, many of them owned by a Taiwanese company called Foxconn.

Foxconn has in recent years seen its share of negative press. There was an explosion at one of its plants in June that killed three people. Prior to that, there was a disturbing string of suicides that so shocked the sensibilities of Western consumers that it prompted demands for better working conditions and two lengthy cover stories in Wired and in Bloomberg BusineEerily absent is any comment on the reaction of those employees in attendance. Did they cheer at the thought of being freed up from least popular jobs on the line by robots? Or did they begin to worry anew, grasping the economic realities that additional factory automation brings with it?ssweek.Read more