These workers have no other way to earn money. I am not saying Foxconn is an angel, but it is the only option these workers have. The other options are to work in agriculture, or educate/train themselves in some other trade/profession. We know how difficult agriculture is. Re-training takes time, effort and money, and I am not sure if the workers can afford any of the three.
It would be wonderful if all the shitty/boring/junk/monotonous work is left to robots. But that has to happen gradually. While we improve robots technology, we should also solve the problem of finding enough work for the workforce that the robots will replace. These two needs to go hand in hand. Otherwise we'll have some serious trouble in our hands. We are at 7 billion people today, and we are on track for 9 billion in the next few decades. How are we going to keep this many people busy?
I notice that lack of ways to earn money affects already some western countries for a decade or two.
Some people (especially young ones not yet placed inside hierarchies that are excuses to give money to the older ones) have trouble with earning basic levels of income.
There are few solutions to that discovered so far.
US for example builds prisons. Hires some young people as guards and puts lots of others inside. It's easily done by penalizing almost harmless activity popular among poor youth. Then uses this as excuse to provide for both groups.
Northern European countries give their young lots of education. It's nice because some of those young people might eventually learn to do something actually economically useful like building robots, electronics or software. All this education also gives government great excuse for providing for those students and their families (having a child while young is encouraged there).
I'm not sure what kind of excuse will china make up to provide for their youth but I hope it won't be something horrible.
You have stumbled into an old fallacy, the idea that there are a fixed number of jobs. More robots increases productivity for society and creates the excess resources for new and better jobs in other sectors, normally the service sector. This is a huge win.
You have stumbled onto an old fallacy either - that the creation of new jobs as a result of technological development floats all boats equally.
Replacing people with robots certainly increases productivity, and frees up resources for other pursuits - it is also unlikely that the people whose jobs have been removed will find employment in many of these new jobs.
So sure, the entirety of the closed system (i.e. the Earth) has experienced a net productivity boost - but for the areas impacted (i.e. that part of China) this is very much a net negative.
This is probably the greatest social issue we face today. We are very rapidly replacing the jobs of tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions, of people. We are creating jobs elsewhere as a result - but the intersection of these new jobs with the skills of the unemployed is very low, and the nature of these new jobs also means retraining is becoming harder, not easier.
Someday they will be forced to. Its just cost of production will fall down so rapidly and to such low amounts.
Getting rich that way will be like trying to fill a terabyte scale hard drive by adding 10 byte text files. It will be a exercise in futility. Think of it more like free phone calls, unlimited internet band width and free apps.
But think about it - if the cost of labor plummets, and material costs plummet because the labor required to gather and refine materials plummets, the cost of pretty much every need and most wants are ridiculously low to non-existant. It's quite similar to the discussions about the economic impact of a molecular assembler.
