As Apple grew, American workers left behind
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| Photo by Bobby Yip, Reuters-- Many of Foxconn's factories, like this one in Longhua in southern China, installed nets to discourage workers from jumping to their deaths last year. Foxconn manufactures many Apple products. June 2, 2010 file photo. |
By Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele
This story is being co-published with The Philadelphia Inquirer, which will host a live chat at 1 p.m. Monday.The death of Steve Jobs was followed by an avalanche of superlatives — brilliant, genius and visionary among the more common. He was likened to Leonardo da Vinci, Albert Einstein and Thomas Edison.
But in the case of Edison, there was one significant difference that went unmentioned. For more than a century, just one of Edison’s inventions alone — the incandescent light bulb —was manufactured at numerous locations in the United States, providing employment for millions of Americans across family generations.
The Apple home computer not at all. After only one generation, all the Apple manufacturing jobs in America disappeared, as the work of building and assembling the machines was turned over to laborers in sweatshops in China and other countries. Jobs that should have provided employment for Americans for decades to come were terminated.
For Apple, the corporation, the system functioned beautifully. This year the company had more cash in its bank accounts than the U.S. Treasury. And for one day, Monday, Sept. 19, the company was the most valuable corporation on the planet, its stock worth $382 billion. It was a sum that exceeded even the worth of Exxon Mobil Corp., the world's largest international oil and gas company.
Needless to say, Apple proved a disaster for its onetime production workers. It turned out to be a classic bait-and-switch con for working folks. One day they held jobs that allowed them to do all the things people had come to expect from their employment. The next day the jobs were gone.
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