Apple To Help Foxconn Improve Factories 166
An anonymous reader writes "In a welcome move, Apple has agreed to help share initial costs with Foxconn in improving the factories being used to manufacture iDevices. From the article: 'Foxconn chief Terry Gou did not give a figure for the costs, but the group has been spending heavily to fight a perception its vast plants in China are sweatshops with poor conditions for its million-strong labor force. It regards the criticism as unfair. "We've discovered that this (improving factory conditions) is not a cost. It is a competitive strength," Gou told reporters on Thursday after the ground-breaking ceremony for a new China headquarters in Shanghai. "I believe Apple sees this as a competitive strength along with us, and so we will split the initial costs."'"
Re:Still no factory in the USA (Score:4, Informative)
Not true at all - if the US manufacturing industry was a country all by itself, it would have the sixth largest economy in the world with a GDP of over two trillion [2010] dollars.
What's actually happened is three fold: the manufacture of consumer goods has fled overseas, the productivity of individuals has gone up, and automation has taken over in a big way since the digital revolution. Yes, the manufacturing sector employs a hell of a lot fewer people than it did forty years ago, but no - it hasn't gone away. (In fact, over the last decade it's been growing.)