Foxconn & not really
There's really two stories. 1) Foxconn 2) PRC managers and workers and union etc. Foxconn follows "when in Rome do as the Romans do", so a lot of the ongoings are PRC management - culture. Very big factories like Foxconn's ops are very hard to create in outside-culture patterns. Toyota successfully instills it's kata in PRC, with a swack of provisos because the prevailing culture still tends to bonk things.
Foxconn is Taiwanese. Check the local Taiwanese businessman's school in that area of China. You'll find PRC schooling problems in a school offering a Taiwanese program. Same pattern of problems - and problems to do with the kids. A very sensitive area. When the sky fell and all the money first dribbled away, the PRC Chinese boss of the Dongguan Taiwanese businessman's school decided to cut back. His budget and available money was actually unchanged, he just followed the local crash norms. So he skewered the living arrangements for the higher-paid-than-everybody-else white-face english-second-language teachers, and they left. Bonkering the school program and saving money that the businessmen employing him were happy to spend on their kids. That's the place where Foxconn operates.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
