TAIWANESE electronics manufacturer Foxconn, which assembles products for Apple, plans to have a million robots, by the next three years, in operation in its Chinese plants, replacing very large numbers of Chinese workers.
Foxconn is the world’s biggest contract electronics maker, and also works for Sony, Nokia, Dell and Hewlett Packard.
It has expanded in China at a frantic pace. Its Chinese workforce has grown from 600,000 in 2008 to a million today.
It now faces increased costs after independent trade unions have been organised and taken strike actions that have doubled wages.
All this has been done at a terrible cost – at least 17 workers have killed themselves in the past five years because of the super-exploitation.
Chairman Terry Gou told a staff gathering at Longhua in southern Guangdong province about the proposed introduction of 300,000 robots in the next year rising to a million within three years, as reported by the China Business News.
His remarks have caused a storm that has not lessened by his later amendment, that he intended to move one million employees ‘higher up the value chain’.
In fact, Foxconn has specialised in super-exploiting its employees in the New Economic Zones that have been set up by the Chinese Communist Party leaders especially for that purpose.
However, the Foxconn regime of super-exploitation has met its match in the Chinese workers who have formed fighting trade union organisations that have not only managed to double wages in the past period but also to fight for better working and accommodation conditions.
Foxconn and other manufacturers have sought to move to other factory locations in Chengdu, Chongqing, Zhengzhou, and to even transfer plants to Vietnam to get away from the rising militancy of the Chinese working class.
Now it has brought forward its plan to replace the workers with robots.
Alistair Thornton, China analyst for IHS Global Insight in Beijing, said: ‘It’s no longer easy to double production by doubling your workforce, it might be now cheaper to buy a new machine in the long run.’
Thornton added: ‘I don’t think this is a one-off. Foxconn is often seen as a bell-wether of global manufacturing in China . . . Workers can command higher wages and are less willing to settle for lower ones.’
The rising tide of anger in the working class is not just a major problem for the Foxconn company. It is an even bigger problem for the Chinese Stalinist regime that has turned the deformed workers state to the right, and invited the capitalists of the world to make super-profits at the expense of the Chinese workers.
This process has brought gigantic revenues to the Chinese state, and has created conditions whereby the bureaucracy props up the US by purchasing its debt. It has declared that China, although it continues to be ruled by the dictatorship of the proletariat, constitutes one state with two social systems.
The Chinese working class will defend its jobs and demand that both the foreign capitalists and their new bourgeois allies inside China are expropriated and that the planned economy is restored.
The Chinese workers have shown their militancy. They now require a revolutionary leadership. It is time for a section of the International Committee of the Fourth International to be built in China, to lead the workers’ political revolution to overthrow the bureaucracy, and its bourgeois allies, and to bring in rule through workers and peasants soviets as part of the development of the world socialist revolution.