“Asia’s sophisticated electronics supply chain and massive labor pool are two obstacles standing in the way of President-elect Donald Trump’s pledge to make U.S. companies bring manufacturing jobs home,” Kathy Chu and Juro Osawa report for Dow Jones Newswires.
“When Jabil Circuit Inc., the world’s third-largest contract manufacturer by revenue, needed to quickly ramp up production of its electronics components a few years ago, the company was able to add 35,000 workers in China in less than six weeks,” Chu and Osawa report. “‘In no other country can you scale up so quickly,’ said John Dulchinos, vice president of digital manufacturing at Jabil, a St. Petersburg, Fla., supplier to companies such as Apple Inc. and Electrolux SA. ‘You have the ability to move quickly and there’s a really strong electronics supply chain in Asia centered around China.'”
“Jabil’s experience underscores the integral roles of China’s armies of migrant workers and Asia’s decades-old supply chain in global electronics productions,” Chu and Osawa report. “It is an issue Mr. Trump will need to address if he wants to bring large-scale production back to a U.S. economy that Washington, D.C. think tank Economic Policy Institute estimates has lost more than 5.4 million manufacturing jobs and 82,000 factories between 1997 and 2013.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Who says the armies of assembly line workers will be humans?
The manufacturing jobs of the future will be focused on keeping the robotic assembly lines running in “lights out” plants. In fact, it’s already happening and has been for some time now. Note to The Wall Street Journal: This is 2016, not 1986.
The robots will come eventually. There are too many benefits. They don’t get tired. They don’t make mistakes. They don’t jump off roofs…. Etc. — MacDailyNews, December 5, 2014
SEE ALSO:
Apple assembler Foxconn now has 40,000 ‘Foxbot’ robots working at factories in China – October 5, 2016
Apple supplier Foxconn replaces 60,000 factory workers with robots – May 25, 2016
Foxconn robots better, but still not precise enough to assemble Apple iPhones – December 5, 2014
Foxconn CEO disappointed with current-gen iPhone-assembling robots; next-gen ‘Foxbots’ in the works – September 22, 2014
Foxconn to deploy ‘Foxbot’ robots for iPhone assembly – July 7, 2014
Why Foxconn’s iPhone robots could create American jobs – February 2, 2014
Apple dives deeper into designing and inventing robots, other manufacturing tech – November 22, 2013
Robots made Apple switch to ‘Made in the U.S.A.’ Macs – December 11, 2012
Foxconn’s 2012 plan: More robots, no layoffs, zero suicides, new factories – November 22, 2011
Foxconn to replace some workers with 1 million robots within 3 years – July 31, 2011