How Companies Like Apple are Destroying Our Economy

Linked from Apple, Inc
Supplier Responsibility page.*

America has a deep rooted problem with our economy. Our Middle Class has almost entirely disappeared as our exports are now our imports. More and more we're becoming a provider of services, instead of goods. I recently read and article that used Apple, Inc. as an example to demonstrate what exactly has gone wrong. I rarely agree completely with something of this nature, but alas, I found myself compelled to read the whole thing and found myself agreeing on nearly every point.

The article reveals that manufacturing jobs have been shipped overseas not entirely because Chinese workers are much cheaper than American workers, in fact it pointed out that it would only cost ~$60 USD  more per device to make iPads in the USA. The problem, however, is that Chinese factories have surpassed the capabilities of their American counterparts astronomically.



Apple says that we simply don't have the mid-skilled workforce that China has. By mid-skilled, they intend to mean people with more than a high-school diploma but less than a Bachelors degree. There simply are not enough laborers with Associates degrees in applied sciences or technical degrees/certificates.

The other underlying problem being in the Apple supply chain, any manufacturing supply chain even. If you're manufacturing in China and you need a glass screen, that factory is down the road. Need a screw? It's the factory next door. Need a screw in a different shape, size, or tolerance? It will take four hours. See what I mean? Top this off with the ability of Chinese factories' ability to scale up or down at a moment's notice, and you have the perfect conditions to pump out hundreds of thousands of iPhones everyday.

Reportedly Chinese factories can hire and fire tens of thousands of employees at any given time as needed. When all your employees live on-site in company dormitories, sleeping 6-12 (or more) each, you have a workforce ready at any hour of the day to fill an order. Steve Jobs is said to have called his high-ranking executives into his office one day to show them the scratched screen on his iPhone. He demanded scratch-free glass and he got it. The glass arrived at a Factory in China around midnight and the workers were reportedly given a biscuit and a cup of tee. Allegedly in less than four hours over 8,000 workers were fitting new scratch-free screens into iPhones only weeks before they were set to ship.

Good luck finding the American Worker who is willing to work 6-7 days a week, live on-site, and wake up at midnight to put new screens into iPhones whenever Apple decides to make a last minute change to the screens of their latest model.

In the end, the question remains how do we fix it? Reading the comments in the article you'll find plenty of ideas that are on the right track, but don't quite solve the problem. I did, however, manage to extrapolate a doable solution to bring jobs back to America. The answer then? It lies in taxation. If we raise the taxes on American companies to such a point as that they simply can barely cover their bottom line for as long as they manufacture more than a certain percentage of their goods in other countries they would be forced to make changes.

The increased taxes would then start help covering our country's bottom line (which has grown out of control), as well as enabling them to set up educational funds and programs to educate enough people to fill those mid-skilled positions in the manufacturing plants.

A good argument to this would be that the supply chain is still on the other side of the world, and you would be right. However, if factories started popping up that needed screws, then a new screw factory is going to pop up next door. Even if we did still make the screws in this country, it would take around 35 days to ship them overseas by freight and it would cost 10 times as much to ship them by air.

Steve Jobs told Obama that these manufacturing jobs aren't coming back to the USA, but they can. Even if Apple and Microsoft and other companies already have a strong lobbyist control in Washington, we the People are stronger. You only have to look at what DemandProgress.Org has done for SOPA and PIPA. When Americans rally behind a cause, Washington notices. Trust me, your senators and your congressmen like their overly-high salaries, pensions, 401ks and government healthcare benefits. If we send enough E-mails, raise enough noise, we can make reform happen. It all starts with a call or an E-mail to your senator or district representative. Simply let them know that you are their constituent and that they will lose your vote if something isn't done. You might think your solitary voice will go unheard, but trust me, you won't be alone. Hundreds of thousands of us can make a difference. Tell DemandProgress that you want them in on this campaign. We can make changes even when the high-powered and over-funded lobbyists seem to be running the show.



* I believe my usage of this photo to be within fair-use.