News
News Categories

Foxconn lays off 60,000 factory workers, replaces them with robots

By Koh Wanzi - on 26 May 2016, 10:00am

Foxconn lays off 60,000 factory workers, replaces them with robots

 Image Source: Foxconn

Apple and Samsung supplier Foxconn says that it has cut 60,000 jobs at one of its factories and replaced them with robots, a move that is part of an ongoing process to automate many of the manufacturing tasks in its operations.

Foxconn is a prominent player in the supply chain for some of the world’s biggest tech companies, and its subsidiary, FIH Mobile, recently acquired Microsoft’s feature phone business for US$350 million. Its push toward more extensive automation in the manufacturing process is likely to add greater impetus to China’s already heavy investment in a robot workforce, and the company expects other firms to follow suit.

But despite having reduced its employee strength at the factory from 110,000 to just 50,000, Foxconn claims that this doesn’t mean job losses in the long term. Instead, it says that robots and other innovative manufacturing technologies will relieve employees of more repetitive tasks, and allow them to focus on higher value-added elements like R&D and process and quality control.

Companies across the globe are quickly finding that robots can be a lot cheaper and more efficient than human workers, and debate is swirling around the human cost of automation, as robots put more and more people out of work.

In January this year, a World Economic Forum (WEF) report even estimated that five million jobs – with administrative and office positions at the highest risk of being affected – would be lost to robots by 2020. A 2013 paper titled “The Future of Employment” by Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne paints an even more dire picture, predicting that around 50 percent of jobs will be lost to automation over the next four to five decades.

In the near term, proponents of automation say that it is the most grinding and repetitive jobs that will go first, which could potentially improve conditions and welfare for workers as they could then focus on more meaningful tasks. This has particular significance for Foxconn, which has been mired by controversy surrounding a spate of worker suicides and reports of deplorable factory conditions.

Source: BBC

Join HWZ's Telegram channel here and catch all the latest tech news!
Our articles may contain affiliate links. If you buy through these links, we may earn a small commission.