“My plan worked! Now everyone will realize I’m a GENIUS!” – Mike Daisey*
Big slide in profits for Foxconn, the huge Chinese manufacturer that I no longer need to describe to you. Fine: they assemble iPads and iPhones and Kindles and a million zillion other electronics. The company made a profit of $509 million compared to $1.09 billion last quarter.
Why? The company’s been forced to make things better for workers. At least, that’s according to the Foxconn honcho.
From Tech Crunch:
Chairman Terry Gou said this quarter was particularly affected by Foxconn’s recent image problem. Improvements in wages, worker benefits, and education accounted for some of the loss, although new iPad and iPhone 4S manufacturing bolstered income last quarter.
That image problem has led to worker raises and other amenities for the workers there. The workers were putting on a festive face at a party in Taipei where 200 top performing workers celebrated the end of a week-long expenses-paid vacation by cheering on the company brass. “It’s like a kind of magic!”, one old man told playwright Mike Daisey**.
* not really
** not really
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