There are a lot of lines at a typical Foxconn factory in China. There’s the assembly line, where thousands of young people – typically high school dropouts – put together each and every part of an iPad. It’s tedious, mind-numbing work, and that’s why assembly line workers usually don’t stick around very long. They quit, and that necessitates another line: The hiring line outside a Foxconn factory is, at any given time, hundreds of applicants long, migrants from the countryside who arrive each day to replace workers who’ve quit. When you consider the manufacturer has a million workers – it’s China’s largest private employer – this labor cycle isn’t surprising.
But it is costly.
“The turnover rate is pretty high and it’s impossible to retain all our workers,” says Li Yong Zhong, a manager at Foxconn’s Chengdu plant, “But we’d like every employee to be able to develop and improve their knowledge, skills and income so that they’ll want to stay here.”