The latest Foxconn wildcate strike makes the clearest link yet between Apple's direct demands on the workforce and their consequences. There's also the fact that Foxconn seem to have tried to meet production targets by cancelling leave for Golden Week, which is more or less the same as abolishing Christmas (which in turn seems to be subject to a sort of creeping abolition in the UK when considered as a holiday, but that's another issue). Also:
Geoffrey Crothall, a spokesman for the pressure group China Labor Bulletin, said at the time that Foxconn workers were becoming increasingly emboldened.
"They're more willing to stand up for their rights, to stand up to injustice," he said.
I wonder how much this extends to all those thousands of junior-high school educated rural Chinese teens and post teens assessing that it would be extremely hard for Apple to switch production from Foxconn - given the volume of the work the company does for them - and therefore they have the potential leverage of causing worldwide hipster tantrums, among other things.
"They're more willing to stand up for their rights, to stand up to injustice"
Of course. As Marx pointed out, once the reserve army of the unemployed is exhausted then conditions for the workers will improve.
And there are indeed many stories out there about labour shortages in China. Which is why wages are rising so strongly. No need for a liberal, neoliberal or even Keynesian explanation: this is just straight classical economics.
Posted by: Tim Worstall | October 08, 2012 at 09:54 AM
Count me in as wholeheartedly in favor of the discomfiture of the hipster classes. Go Foxconn workers!
Speaking of the pain of hipsters, here from the bedroom community of Google/Apple/Oracle (the city formerly known as SF) - it recently occurred to me that someone needs to stage a reenactment of the Jerome Robbins Jets/Sharks number between the Mission hipsters and the Marina former-frat boy types, staged in United Nations Plaza.
Trying to figure out how to transliterate the Maria and Tony characters. The tattooed/pierced hipster chicks passive-aggressively making your coffee waaaaaay toooooo sloooooowly are clearly far too tough to be Maria, but they'd make a good crew for the America number, maybe takes place "off-site" at Burning Man? And Maria is a clueless sap in the original, so just keep that, I am supremely confident the Playa has an abundant supply of utter saps, renewed annually.
The mindless violence, tribal loyalty and idiocy of Tony's crew need little to no work to translate to the frat boy element of the Marina, so that's sorted.
If only there were some way to produce this with all proceeds going to the Foxconn strike fund!
Posted by: sf reader | October 09, 2012 at 04:57 AM
I really doubt this does any work. First night sales just aren't a very big proportion of the total, and pretty much by definition a lot of people who run to the Apple Store on day one are going to be disappointed. Which is, from Apple's POV, the point.
One thing the Foxconn workers certainly see is how much capital Apple invests into the iThing supply chain, because it shows up at the plant in big crates marked "Schmidt & Kielowitz Maschinenbau GmbH" or similar. See here for beautiful charts.
Sensibly, rather than destroying it and rendering themselves unemployed, they evidently realise how much just idling it hits the return on all that investment (the grey columns in Horace's charts), with the advantage that going on strike is reversible while smashing the machine tools isn't.
It's also interesting that the quality control people walked out. It sounds like Foxconn is a final-inspection shop, not a total-quality operation, so if QC isn't functioning, all the wheels stand still. A figure of 200 is given for the number of QC inspectors, so they've discovered the smallest number of strikers you need to idle the whole plant, and by extension, the iGadget supply chain.
Also, using Horace's stats, it looks like Apple and Foxconn work under JIT most of the time, but build stocks ahead of important moments like new product launches. So the timing is interesting; did they let the inventory bulge go out and the supply chain tighten before they (literally) struck?
Posted by: Alex | October 09, 2012 at 09:44 AM
On the theme of machine tools, North Korea awards a medal to a lathe, although only because a Kim once used it.
Posted by: Alex | October 09, 2012 at 10:07 AM
Here's someone actually bitching about not getting a shiny: https://twitter.com/_DonaldS/status/255707995344863232
Posted by: Alex | October 09, 2012 at 05:40 PM