[Photo by Park Sae-jin]
Foxconn, the electronics manufacturer, reportedly replaced 60,000 workers with robots in a factory located in China's Kunshan region. Foxconn supplies electric parts to companies such as Apple and Samsung.
According to South China Morning Post's report updated on Sunday, Foxconn recently reduced its employee strength from 110,000 to 50,000. The media wrote that the job-cutting is the effort of Kunshan government trying to reinvent the county's growth strategy by replacing humans with robots.
Foxconn is one of approximately 4,800 Taiwanese companies who have factories built in Kunshan. It is the primary contract manufacturer for major electronics companies worldwide. The Foxconn factories have a history of its workers committing suicides due to harsh working conditions and in January 2012, about 150 Foxconn workers protested against the company demanding improvement in their working conditions.
According to a government survey, as many as 600 companies in Kunshan are planning a similar process to reduce labor costs by replacing its employees with robots.
Although reducing labor costs by getting more robots to do humans' jobs could be considered a success for manufacturing companies, so many people losing jobs could become a disaster to the local economy.
Kunshan was home to 2.5 million people in 2014, but the numbers are to dwindle since the two-thirds of the population are migrant workers. The county already suffered less than three percent growth figure in 2014 and 2015, with workers moving out of the county to look for a job somewhere else, the county's growth would suffer a serious backlash.
Aju News Park Sae-jin = swatchsjp@ajunews.com
reporter
Park Sae-jin
swatchsjp@ajunews.com
