Hating the News - Follow Up

A couple weeks ago I found (searched out?) the need to explicate the Foxconn situation in China. In the days since, several developments have occurred that I thought I'd share.

- Foxconn raised salaries of employees (who were already making a lot of money compared to other Chinese).

- Foxconn announced another salary increase planned for the fall.

- People applauded Foxconn's efforts.

- Foxconn announced that it is looking to move some production to Taiwan or Vietnam.

The overall result is that some Foxconn employees will get paid a bit more. Other Foxconn employees will lose their job entirely. This may take some time, the production flow of these types of companies doesn't really allow for any kind of immediate shift, but because the labor costs rose in China it now makes more business sense to take the production elsewhere.

Can we get some media outlets to vent their 'righteous indignation' towards the other media outlets who cost people their jobs? No?

(To be fair - the future Taiwanese or Vietnamese Foxconn workers will benefit from this move so an objective viewpoint may be that this is all a wash. But what drives me nuts about this is that people were clamoring for better working conditions for the Chinese and instead caused many of them to have no working conditions at all.)

Labels: news, politics

posted by Brett at 11:55 AM