It was a while ago that I read about Apple’s ethical-outsourcing problems with the infamous Foxconn. The latter is the Taiwanese manufacturer whose workers have been committing suicide in China.

Foxconn manufactures computer parts and gadgets. Taiwan was (and, perhaps, to some extent still is) a major centre for such things. Open up just about any computer, and you will see all sorts of parts (ASUS motherboards etc) inside which have been, wholly or partially, designed and manufactured in Taiwan. Noawadays, though, a lot of this work has been moved to mainland China. Both the engineering and the fabrication are now, increasingly, done in the mainland.

Apple’s problem is that, even though it has reportedly been very candid about the workplace abuses it has found in these factories, it claims to be unable to do anything about them. Reportedly, there are only 3 manufacturers left which can handle Apple’s production demands. And all other major brands (HP, Dell etc) are in the same predicament.

How did this come about? What happened to all the engineers in North America, the fabrication labs (each of which cost a billion dollars or so, IIRC), the R&D centres? All that is left now are the high-level stuff (services and assorted IT work which amounts to gluing various applications together) as opposed to the low-level work of design and manufacture (of the very devices which IT and consumers use). IOW, the upstream has gone! And it has gone to China.

I recall the massive purges which took place after the dot-com bubble’s crash in 2000. Motorola, 3COM, AT&T, Nortel et al were laying off people in the tens of thousands. Thirty thousand in one place, twenty thousand in another! And there were second rounds of lay-offs as well.

But this was not the end of it. Soon thereafter, outsourcing (which is the sub-contracting of work to outside entities) and offshoring (which is the wholesale shifting of work to cheaper, foreign countries) started.

Engineering was decimated! When one looks at the bail-outs for the auto industry — we’ll leave aside, for now, the banksters’ tax loot — or for any other unionized or organized group of workers (fishermen, construction etc), one wonders why the bedrock of the so-called Knowledge Economy has been left out!

Much blame lies with the community itself. Though there is no shortage of complaints about H1-B workers (foreign engineers brought-in by US companies), American engineers have largely stayed quiet about this. Faced with insurmountable demands from companies (who then claim that the vacancies have gone unfulfilled, and so import people from India), engineers quietly and slowly drop out.