How Industrial Robots Impact Employment

The Foxconn production line that has been criticized for monotonous boring has recently undergone new changes.

A production line with 30 former workers, now only 5, they only need to be responsible for pushing buttons and running machines. Other workers are replaced by robotic arms that insert components into the motherboard.

Foxconn’s grand plan shows that such changes will gradually expand to the entire group.

Foxconn CEO Terry Gou said that he hopes to install 300,000 robotic arm before the end of this year, reaching 1 million by 2014, and launching the first batch of fully automated factories in the next 5 to 10 years.

It is not difficult for Foxconn to introduce this huge plan.

The total number of workers in the “Hon Hai China” processing plant is as high as 1.5 million. Such a large scale can be called an “empire”. However, in this huge empire’s personnel management in recent years, the situation was frequent. For example, it was accused of hiring child labor, a series of employee jumping events, and the recent worker riots.

Labor shortages, rising labor costs, dissatisfaction with workers' monotonous work, and such issues have all become problems that Foxconn has almost no solution.

Getting robots to work seems to be the only option Foxconn can do. They have no feelings, are absolutely obedient to work, and are qualified for dangerous and monotonous work. In terms of cost, they also seem to have more and more advantages. The data shows that, on average, starting from the third year of using robots, the cost will begin to be lower than that of the ordinary labor force, and this cost advantage will become more apparent.

In fact, in addition to Foxconn, which has been battered by manpower management, there are more and more companies that choose to get robots to work.

BYD, Great Wall Motors, Sany Heavy Industry, and Raboel have robot employees. According to the data, in 2000, the number of industrial robots in China was only 3,500 units. By 2011, this figure had jumped to more than 70,000 units. In 2011, the sales growth of robots in China, such as Fanuc Japan and Germany KUKA, all exceeded 100%.

The robot really came!

“In China, there will be some development in industrial robot applications, but it is difficult to achieve a large scale.” Xu Zhaoyuan, deputy researcher of the Development Research Center of the State Council, said that due to the large amount of one-time investment, it is only a relatively strong and large scale assembly line. The company is more practical. "Not for all types of businesses."