Thirty spokes meet at a nave;
Because of the hole we may use the wheel.
Clay is moulded into a vessel;
Because of the hollow we may use the cup.
Walls are built around a hearth;
Because of the doors we may use the house.
Thus tools come from what exists,
But use from what does not.
- Tao De Ching
There’s a carousel in a small Cape Cod town that we visited this summer and the kids rode it a few times. The carousel is quite old and quite handsome and it makes a great diversion of an evening. I’m reminded now of trying to take pictures of the kids while they rode the carousel. For a while I’d wave and try to get their attention as they roared past, their laughter dopplering around the edge of the curve, and then, after four or five tries I’d give up and just watch. It’s a wheel, an endless circle, designed to delight and enthuse and distract. → Read More
Foxconn responded to yesterday’s kerfuffle about the CEO of Foxconn, Terry Gou, commenting that he cared for “a million animals” – namely his employees. They said it was an off-the-cuff remark, similar to saying that managing is like “herding cats” as opposed to suggesting that Foxconn employees walk on all fours and root in the mud. Big difference, clearly.
The statement is below. I love the line “Mr. Gou’s comments were directed at all humans and not at any specific group.”
→ Read More
While I suspect there’s a lot lost in translation here,Foxconn chairman Terry Gou made a wildly distasteful joke this week at the Taipei Zoo, saying (according to WantChinaTimes): “Hon Hai (Foxconn) has a workforce of over one million worldwide and as human beings are also animals, to manage one million animals gives me a headache.”
The comments came during a presentation at the zoo where the superintendant Chin Shih-chien gave a talk on feeding and taking care of his charges. Gou has apparently hired Chin to make recommendations and help Foxconn executives learn how to manage large organizations. → Read More
Shenzhen is a town of migrants. The estimated median ages is between 15 and 25 and the old and battered sits in wild contrast with the brand new. Even in the few years between my last visit and this one, the city has changed so drastically that I barely recognized it. The last time I was here I imagined the place as a cross between a favela and Blade Runner, high and low tech mashed together, the sharp tails of known carcinogens mixing with the soft end of Suntory in a highball glass and the scent of a young executive assistant’s Chanel No 5.
Now it’s mostly Suntory and Chanel, the carcinogens banished to the outskirts of town. There’s a boom in China, and Foxconn’s executives see a way out of many of the messes, real or imagined, that plagued the company.
Foxconn is pinning their future success on their employees’ future success. While this may seem like uncessary largesse, it is an interesting bet on the future of a working class that has been transformed into a middle class. And those workers, once forced by circumstance to stand for ten hours a day, are workers that no longer need or want what seemingly meager financial benefits Foxconn has to offer.
→ Read More
The entrepreneur was fuming over the phone. He is arguably angry: he had heard of a company had just been raided on trumped up charges and I spoke to him one evening after he returned to the UK.
“Chinese people basically believe that their success in manufacturing is because Chinese people are so smart,” he said. “But why does the world get stuff made in China? Just one reason: it’s cheap.”
“That’s the advantage. And it’s going to be so easy for China to shoot that one advantage away,” he said.
→ Read More
Driving from the Foxconn Factory, down the road from the main gate, we spotted a truck full of pigs in an open-sided container. They were huge, porcine pink, and surprisingly clean. They were still alive – but wouldn’t be for long – and they were, we could only presume, destined for the bellies of some of the company’s 400,000 workers.
As the truck trundled along the well-paved road, I flicked through the pictures I took of the Foxconn kitchen. It was something out of a delicious version of Hieronymus Bosch: huge cauldrons manned by men and women in white smocks, smoke and steam coming out of huge soup pots, the food flipped and tossed using shovels.
There, in the course of the day, nearly 400,000 meals pour out into the campus. There a cooker the size of two truck trailers cleans, cooks, and cools hundreds of pounds of rice, and some of those pigs (slaughtered off campus because that’s one thing the kitchen at Foxconn isn’t allowed to do) are stir-fried or stewed and sent out to one of the many campus cafeterias.
→ Read More
At first I thought the birds in the trees at the Foxconn’s largest plant in Shenzhen, China were fake. They sang so sweetly that I was sure my hosts had planted speakers for my benefit – a sort of Potemkin aviary high in the branches.
The plant, called Foxconn City, is one of Foxconn’s 26 major and minor factories around the world. Built by founder Terry Guo in 1974, the City was the first of the many sprawling Foxconn complexes and covers three square kilometers. It is home to over 400,000 workers, many of whom live in university-style dorms on the Foxconn campus. It is reported to be China’s largest private employer and holds a place in the Western mind as the home to a new form of economic slavery, an eternal bogeyman that haunts the fever dreams of anti-techophiles. It’s also a place where thousands of young employees – some completing their degrees while they work through school, others simply trying to escape the grinding poverty of their home districts, and still others hoping for a leg up in China’s wild economy – come to assemble the items that surround us. Here they make our PCs, our MP3 players, our routers. Here they make our laptops, our cellphones, and our cameras.
In the past year, only one other journalist has been allowed past Foxconn’s gates to see the factory, which is why I thought they had brought the birds (or at least fake Bose birds) out for my benefit. What better allegory for the doings of a secretive, destructive force for evil than fake birds in fake trees? → Read More
Just two weeks ago it was reported that the relationship between Foxconn and Brazil regarding the proposed $12 billion production center there was on the rocks. Foxconn was making demands the government felt were overreaching, and negotiations were stalled.
Government officials and Foxconn representatives announced today that the plan was still underway, and the plant is ready to pump out iPhones. iPads will have to wait until December, which was the original deadline. → Read More
Earlier this year it was reported that Foxconn had decided it was going to try to diversity its global holdings by establishing an iPad factory in Brazil. Their reasoning seemed fine: the economy is expanding, there’s a tech-savvy populace, and the government, they figured, would be game for few little sweetheart deals to get the ball rolling. As it turns out, not so much.
“The project for a Brazilian iPad is in doubt,” said one Brazilian official, speaking on terms of anonymity to Reuters. Foxconn is “making crazy demands” and the Brazilian government appears to be unyielding on tax and funding. → Read More
It’s happened again: a Foxconn plant explosion has caused a large fire in Yantai. According to MICGadget the fire stemmed from “improper operation of workmanship on color spraying” which suggests a aerosol paint may be involved.
The last fire happened in May in Chengdu. This fire was at a plant that made PCs, laptops, and printers. It employs and, in some cases, houses 80,000 workers, many of whom were evacuated. The blaze lasted 30 minutes and there are no reports of casualties. → Read More
Foxconn is planning on replacing many of it’s hard-working human manufacturers with about 1 million robots, a number that, if you think about it, is a very telling comment on the current state of electronics manufacturing.
There are apparently 10,000 robots at the factory now and that number will increase by 300,000 next year. Foxconn CEO Terry Gou plans another million robots by 2014. The company currently employs 1.2 million humans.
→ Read More
A Foxconn employee, Chen Long, died of exhaustion after working a continuous 60-hour shift in one week, stopping rarely to sleep and eat. The employee, who had previously fainted from exhaustion, died in a shower on June 24th.
Here is a rundown by MICGadget:
On June 24th, the day before Chen’s death, everything is normal. Chen got off work at 7pm, and went home for dinner. After having his meal, he went out with his girlfriend for some fun at the Internet bar, until 11pm. Chen got back back home for a sleep after the date. Next day, June 25th, Chen woke up at 11am, feeling dizzy and has no appetite. He reluctantly have a meal that includes instant noodle, chicken feet and fruity flavored milk. He only had a few sips of those food. Chen then felt strengthless and sat at home watching the television. At 5pm, the weather is hot and Chen went to the bathroom for a shower. After two minutes, Chen falls to the ground unconscious. His girlfriend quickly called the ambulance, and when the doctor arrived, Chen is confirmed to be dead.
UPDATED – What appears to be a fire or explosion engulfed one of the buildings at the Foxconn Factory in Chengdu, China. Foxconn is reporting two casualties and 16 hurt and the damage does look severe and quite thorough. MICGadget reported that “10 fire engines, ambulances and 10 police cars” arrived on the scene. Reports state that a few floors in Building A5 (apparently part of the iPad 2 production line) were affected and that the explosion was caused by light dust igniting in one of the manufacturing rooms.
Auto-playing video after the jump. → Read More
A few months ago the Internet was aflame with suicides at Foxconn and then there were rumors that the massive manufacturing company was forcing its employees to sign “anti-suicide” pledges. Now, at least according to a Canadian news organization, Foxconn has confirmed that this is not true. “Foxconn does not ask its employees to sign any such documents, any reports to the contrary are inaccurate,” said Ellin Choy, a Foxconn spokesperson. → Read More
Ancient Chinese proverb says, “Man who goes against Apple will lose his right to eat any fruit ever again.” Digitimes is reporting through Chinese-language sznews.com that three employees were arrested by local police on December 26, 2010 and eventually charged on March 23, 2011 for violating the company’s trade secrets. Reportedly these employees leaked the iPad 2′s design to accessory makers. → Read More
My favorite blogger, Joel Johnson, took a supervised trip to Foxconn’s factories in Shenzhen, China last year and has finally gathered his reporting into an excellent piece in this month’s wired. His mission?
Still, after years of writing what is (at best) buyers’ guidance and (at worst) marching hymns for an army of consumers, I was burdened by what felt like an outsize provision of guilt—an existential buyer’s remorse for civilization itself. I am here because I want to know: Did my iPhone kill 17 people?
I present to you, friends, unadulterated, the horrors witnessed by French journalist Jordan Pouille and recorded in his video, “Inside the Foxconn Prison,” are truly manifold. In what will soon be the The Jungle of its day, Pouille’s video of Chinese factory workers living their oppressed lives while shopping for food, listening to pop music, and meeting for lunch reminds us that jobs suck everywhere and that factory jobs suck the most. → Read More
Our good buddy Joel Johnson went inside Foxconn’s 540,000 employee factory in Shenzhen. There are 950,000+ employees in China alone. To put that into perspective, Columbus, Ohio, my hometown, is home to 711,470 people. → Read More
Ah, capitalism. It looks like the value of manufacturing in China is slowly going down as companies like Foxconn are forced to treat employees like human beings. What does that mean? It means your next iPhone will be a bit pricier. → Read More
It’s not every day you get to look inside a major electronics factory. Most of the work done there is compartmentalized and the manufacturing done for one company never touches the manufacturing done for another. In fact, Foxconn’s R&D labs consist of a series of locked doors. You can only get into one and that’s only if you’re allowed in to see prototypes. It’s an amazing world of secrecy and deception.
That’s why it’s quite interesting that BusinessWeek got to sit down with Terry Gou inside the Foxconn factory in Shenzhen. There they learned about the company’s efforts to stop everyone from killing themselves (parades, chants of “treasure your life”) and still maintain the backbreaking pace required of modern manufacturers. → Read More
