11.09.12
Foxconn offers to train its American stooges
Chuck sends this tidbit in from his news basket:
TAIPEI, Taiwan (AP) — The head of Taiwan’s Foxconn Technology Group says he will invite dozens of American engineers to his factories in China to learn about manufacturing.
News reports here say Terry Gou told a business meeting on Wednesday that he did not believe President Barack Obama could succeed in moving production lines back to the U.S. because Americans have outsourced those jobs for too long.
But Gou says he hopes the Americans can learn how factories are operated so they can return home to set up facilities with automated equipment to resolve the lack of skilled laborers.
Foxconn employs 1.2 million people in China to assemble products for Apple Inc. and other global firms. It has introduced more robots in China over the past two years as it faces soaring wages there.
[“I assume said training also involves advice on where to put the suicide nets…” adds Chuck in e-mail. Couldn’t resist.]
The short news piece contains an internal contradiction. Introduction of automation so as not to pay higher wages is not congruent with a lack of skilled labor.
In fact, anyone who has read the stories on iJunk manufacturing at Foxconn knows that it is hardly skilled labor.
And in the US it has been repeatedly demonstrated that unemployment is the result of lack of demand, rather than labor skills mismatching.
Paul Krugman has dealt with the issue again and again. It is one of those zombie stories used to explain away the need for doing anything about the recession, as accepting the present as the new normal.
As recently as September, Krugman wrote:
Lazear goes through the data, and finds overwhelming evidence of inadequate demand, little if any evidence of structural problems.
I was especially struck by his data on “mismatch??? (which everyone I know calls mishmash): the extent to which there appears to be a misalignment between where the workers are and where the jobs are. In the early stages of the Lesser Depression some data seemed to suggest a sharp rise in mismatch; it was left for us demand-siders to argue that this was actually a cyclical, not structural issue, and not fundamental to the employment problem. Now Lazear informs us that sure enough, mismatch was cyclical, and has in fact come way down even though unemployment remains high …
What all this tells us is that the vast suffering still going on is gratuitous — that we could end this quickly with appropriate monetary and fiscal policies. Unfortunately, between the GOP and the Very Serious People (who love, just love, the idea that it’s structural), it won’t happen any time soon.
Timely as ever. First simple video, too, actually.