I read with great interest that the widow of Steve Jobs sat with Michelle last night…
NYT (no less):
Not long ago, Apple boasted that its products were made in America. Today, few are. Almost all of the 70 million iPhones, 30 million iPads and 59 million other products Apple sold last year were manufactured overseas.Why can’t that work come home? Mr. Obama asked.Mr. Jobs’s reply was unambiguous.“Those jobs aren’t coming back,” he said, according to another dinner guest.
The president’s question touched upon a central conviction at Apple. It isn’t just that workers are cheaper abroad. Rather, Apple’s executives believe the vast scale of overseas factories as well as the flexibility, diligence and industrial skills of foreign workers have so outpaced their American counterparts that “Made in the U.S.A.” is no longer a viable option for most Apple products.Apple has become one of the best-known, most admired and most imitated companies on earth, in part through an unrelenting mastery of global operations. Last year, it earned over $400,000 in profit per employee, more than Goldman Sachs, Exxon Mobil or Google.However, what has vexed Mr. Obama as well as economists and policy makers is that Apple — and many of its high-technology peers — are not nearly as avid in creating American jobs as other famous companies were in their heydays.Apple employs 43,000 people in the United States and 20,000 overseas, a small fraction of the over 400,000 American workers at General Motors in the 1950s, or the hundreds of thousands at General Electric in the 1980s.Many more people work for Apple’s contractors: an additional 700,000 people engineer, build and assemble iPads, iPhones and Apple’s other products. But almost none of them work in the United States. Instead, they work for foreign companies in Asia, Europe and elsewhere, at factories that almost all electronics designers rely upon to build their wares.
“Apple’s an example of why it’s so hard to create middle-class jobs in the U.S. now,” said Jared Bernstein, who until last year was an economic adviser to the White House.“If it’s the pinnacle of capitalism, we should be worried.”
THIS IS THE MUST READ REASON WHY AMERICA IS FUCKED BECAUSE STATE CONTROLLED EMPLOYEES ARE NOT FREE TRADE…
Apple executives say that going overseas, at this point, is their only option.One former executive described how the company relied upon a Chinese factory to revamp iPhonemanufacturing just weeks before the device was due on shelves. Apple had redesigned the iPhone’s screen at the last minute, forcing an assembly line overhaul. New screens began arriving at the plant near midnight.
A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day.“The speed and flexibility is breathtaking,” the executive said. “There’s no American plant that can match that.”Similar stories could be told about almost any electronics company — and outsourcing has also become common in hundreds of industries, including accounting, legal services, banking, auto manufacturing and pharmaceuticals.
What american worker, family and union would ever consent to such working conditions?
“A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories”
AYFKM?
The CIA’s moral and pro American mission should be to ensure that chinese and other workers enjoy the same QUALITY of life that American ingenuity, engineering, manufacturing and labor built here.
State run dormitories, inside the campus of state run, state bank financed, and state built entities in a foreign nation are not capitalism just because Apple’s World HQ is in the USA.
SHAME ON APPLE.
SHAME ON THE USA.
SHAME ON THE CIA.
There is no more moral mission for our CIA than raising the chinese workers quality of life, and thus the COSTS of their labor.
Communism’s raison d’etre was not to create a state controlled labor population for the convenience of others
That would be free trade. What’s going on now is piracy of labor by using a communist giant’s horrible previous conditions.
WAKE UP
7 comments:
Hi Epa.
yes i read the story earlier but it's not just Apple it's very business with the means to relocate.
I heard of ikea products being made in Belarus.Now that's not exactly a 'freedom' loving country either.
Now china is using suncontractors in North Korea how much cheaper can we get?
You can't compete with these guys you got to close your markets to them!Any product made by'slave labor' or below the minimun wages' should be shunned!
I've been saying this for the last 20 years.
That's the only way.
Sorry should read: "Subcontractors".
" ... a biscuit and a cup of tea."
It seems to me Apple is getting awfully close to reaping "obscene profits."
Epa,
This is your best post, in fact, it is the best post I have ever read on why we need to keep our manufacturing here in America.
This is not just an issue of jobs, this is an issue of way of life.
When the USSR fell, it began with the unions in the shipyards of Danzig and Lech Walesa and Solidarity (Solidarność). That is NO coincidence.
The CIA is THE TOOL to ensure that the MORAL and RIGHTEOUS work of America is done in a similar way, and the SIDE EFFECT OF THIS will be the normalization of labor practices, and the enabling of the american workers, and engineers and entrepreneurs to compete EQUALLY.
EQUAL OPPORTUNITY not for the 99%, but for 100%
We will help ourselves by doing right.
In foreign affairs how INFREQUENT is such an opportunity?
That's some essay in the NYT.
It doesn't get much grimmer than this.
Yet, Americans are largely unaware of the facts involved.
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