Foxconn Desperation: Robots Completely Replace Labor?

But in fact, Foxconn is just doing what a contract manufacturer has already done in a labor-intensive industry.

Apple and other customers attach great importance to consistency and quality, coupled with the pressure of rising labor costs, turning to more advanced and more automated production has become an inevitable trend.

In the case of Foxconn, this change will not necessarily lead to layoffs, because the company and China's manufacturing capacity are expanding.

But as time goes on, the degree of automation will give high skilled workers certain advantages.

Lynda Gratton wrote in her new book, The Shift, that in the developed economies, "people are not replaced by machines or computers for tasks that are more complex and need to innovate or solve problems". (Linda The)

This produces a seemingly contradictory and correct conclusion: automation may make manufacturing management more complicated, not simpler.

As enterprises allocate more tasks to machines, the talents they need is such that they can better supervise more advanced labor force and do things that machines can not do.

In a country like China, the economy is growing in a straight line, and the process seems to be equally rapid, in order to maintain profitability at the time of rising labor costs.

A work paper written by Manmohan Soddy (ManMohan Sodhi) of Cass Business School and Professor Christopher Don (Christopher Tang) of the Anderson Business School of University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA Anderson) said that some Chinese contract manufacturers, such as Taiwan quanta computer (Quanta Quanta), have begun pferring part of their production to other companies, and have begun to work with higher profit margins and higher added value.

Prof sudy said: "as they (contract manufacturers) occupy a longer segment in the value chain, the skills Foxconn needs are the skills that people ask Apple employees to have.

(for example) it can handle the relationship with hundreds of customers or suppliers.

The efficiency of the process and the pressure of managers will also increase. This is not new.

Nowadays, Frederick Winslow Taylor's (Frederick Winslow Taylor) time and motion research has been more ridiculed as an outdated thing.

However, as early as 100 years ago, Taylor pointed out in his The Principles of Scientific Management: putting workers in a system of higher mechanization will force managers to undertake other kinds of responsibilities, which will create new heavy burdens.

Knowing what is difficult will not make it easier to solve.

In the 80s and 90s of last century, co-author Edward Lawler Edward Lawler (Management Reset) worked in Ford (Ford) and General Motors (General Motors).

At that time, the two companies were undergoing painful technological and technological changes.

Lawler pointed out that at that time, car manufacturers found it difficult to abandon the "command and control" management mode.

In addition to drawing lessons from the mistakes made by the predecessors of the manufacturing industry, Foxconn (founder Terry Gou, who is known for his authoritarian style of management) is not going to be able to make the pition easier than his predecessors.

Lawler said that in China, manufacturers are actually in the initial stage of pformation from command and control management.

There is no doubt that Foxconn and similar enterprises will eventually be able to automate their labor-intensive production processes.

They have already done so.

The key question is whether they can easily find and train such managers: they can supervise highly skilled workers who are fighting side by side with the army of robots.