I wonder if there is an opportunity for western companies to build factories on a smaller scale to Foxconn where employees live on campus. Wages could be low, but with basic services provided it could be a chance for low wage earners to save up some money. The costs might be too high for it to work on that scale though.
How quickly we forget history.
I mean with some strong regulation things might be different, but with the political landscape as it is I don't think it would work out.
Facilities included schools, sports accomodation etc. PSV, a dutch premier league football team is a project of Phillips the former electronics giant. PSV -> Phillips Sport Vereniging.
And Phillips built neighbourhoods, schools and public swimming pools too.
Ah well ... sigh ( I was not raised in a Phillips neighbourhood btw ).
Company scrip served to make it so you could never save up money to leave, which was the biggest problem.
In the transaction though its the 'job' that is the good thing and employers (in spite of their whining about worker shortages) are able to get people to work at those insufficient wages, and so they continue to pay them.
Unionization broke that cycle once, I'm curious to see if a technology worker union emerges from this growing level of pain.
In a sense, you can be pushed to accept a job at an infeasibly low wage because the alternative is having no income at all.
But more often it goes wrong, like Fordlandia.
I was recently in South Korea and was surprised to see that there were a lot of large apartment buildings around Seoul which appeared to be employee dormitories from previous decades (1980s I believe). Some even still said Samsung and LG on the side.
However, I don't think this concept would work in Western society. The cultures between Asia and the West are very different. It's common for several generations to live in the same house in China/Japan/Korea, but this isn't the case in the West.
I agree it would make sense to build dormitories, from a transportation and economic perspective it makes perfect sense. Economies of scale.
But people in the West don't want to move to live near the factory/warehouse. They want to have a social life, and dorm life really doesn't facilitate having a social life.
Ancedotal, but my intuition is that dorm life is much easier, though that may be inherent to college. It's extremely frustrating to know that few will give you any of their time to form friendships, no matter the effort you try.
Also, I thought warehouses were the trendy places to live now.
I'm sure dorms are great if all you want to do is party all the time. However given that people working at Foxconn/Amazon are probably working 8-16 hours every day, I'm doubtful that they'd really be in a partying mood after working that long.
Hence, when everyone is finished working their shift and just wants to sleep, and you don't, it's a bit hard to be social without pissing off people around you.
> Also, I thought warehouses were the trendy places to live now.
You're talking about old warehouses which have been converted into trendy apartments. This is gentrification. No one actually wants to live in a functional warehouse.
I guess at-will employment is very at-will.
Inside the buildings were apartments that housed up to three people, everyone had their own private bedroom and bathroom. The quality of the buildings was fairly good, not luxury but not cheap.
You could also opt to receive a stipend if you wanted to find your own accommodation, but it was a bit low to get something of the same quality.
And nets!
As an aside, I worked with an ex-Foxconn engineer who lived in the dorms to save money. They wired up his office phone to also ring in his room. When foolish US engineers would call him, not aware of the time difference, it would wake him up in the middle of the night. He took his phone off the hook to get some sleep but got in trouble for it.