Walmart and Amazon pay well above the minimum wage. It might be because they are so altruistic but I suspect they can't find labor worth keeping at that price. I imagine the same will be true for foxconn.
"Well above" isn't super meaningful. I believe Wal-mart's minimum pay is 9/hr and most employees are closer to 12-13. That's not going to be a livable wage in many areas. Add in that half of those are part time and not getting employee supplemented health insurance and it gets less livable.
Walmart has a national minimum of $10 an hour the federal minimum is $7.25. I consider a roughly 25% premium to be a significant increase when talking about salaries. My comment is in regards to these jobs paying minimum wage and the evidence leads me to believe that it is virtually certain that these jobs will pay a significant percentage more than that. (not to mention all the managerial and skilled labor jobs that will pay many times more that will come with them)
Walmart was forced to offer $10 an hour because they were facing staff shortages. The interesting thing is that their profits certainly didn't nose-dive after the bump in their labor's wage rate.
The labor is technical, which at least in the U.S. usually carries higher wages. Chinese workers might be accustomed to low wages in technical jobs, but I don't see Joe Bob quitting his minimum wage burger-flipping job and go work at Foxconn assembling iPhones at minimum wage.
If that is the case, then they will deploy robots, use few human supervisors to oversee the work. Don't expect it will bring their giant manufacturers pipeline here. It is not going to be profitable for them. Why, because Chinese people are cheaper, and for manufacturing, meaning assembling, your output is directly associated with your working time, where in China they can force workers to work 12 hours, here no chance they could do that.
