A Deep Dive into Foxconn and China's Labor Market

From the Financial Times:

Foxconn struggles to adjust to China’s changing labour landscape

At first it looks like very expensive rubber. But Samuel Fu dips his finger into a disc of carbon nanotubing and pulls. And pulls, and pulls. The black spindles and foils spread out like a spider's web until he stands a metre away.

Behind Mr Fu, surgical-masked workers and robot arms work with the new infinitely elastic material, which was developed jointly by China’s Tsinghua University and CNTouch, a subsidiary of Taiwanese manufacturing group Foxconn that is headed by Mr Fu.

The seemingly magical substance is the key to manufacturing a new generation of ultra efficient touchscreens, for cars and smartphones. It is part of an effort by Foxconn, which achieved fame as the maker of most of Apple’s products, to shed its image as an assembly line and reinvent itself, selling its own technology rather than snapping others’ products together.

Hence Foxconn’s pioneering high-tech plant outside Guiyang, the capital of Guizhou province in southwestern China. For Terry Gou, founder and chairman, it is a vision of what the future of Chinese manufacturing might be.

Instead of rows of workers with screwdrivers, the 500-acre campus boasts robot workshops, an eco-friendly data centre cooled by a natural wind tunnel, smart lighting and on-site filtered wastewater. The distance between three gargantuan eco-friendly manufacturing complexes is easily traversed on carbon neutral golf carts....MUCH MORE

 Foxconn struggles to adjust to China's changing labour landscape