In February 2011, during a dinner of the Silicon Valley corporate leaders with then-President Barack Obama, each of the guests was asked to bring a question for the head of state. It is said that when Steve Jobs was about to speak, Obama interrupted him with a question of his own: “what would it take to make iPhones in the United States?”
Apple’s labor policies are well known:
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.1
Jobs’ answer says it all: it doesn’t just reflect the priorities of the technology sector and the anti-interventionist neoliberal ethic that underpins the entire corporate world. It reveals that it is business, not government, that has the final say when it comes to creating jobs. Of course, the technology sector has not lagged behind the trend of large-scale outsourcing that began in the 1980s. Of the approximately 700,000 people who engineer, build and assemble iPads, iPods and iPhones, apart from designing duties (designed by Apple in California, repeats itself like a mantra upon opening any of its products), almost none of them work in the United States. The working conditions of these undeclared Apple workers, say Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco,
typify the misery endured by the corporate global labor force—low wages; excessive overtime, in some cases seven days a week and up to twelve hours a day; squalor and overcrowding in worker dormitories; swelling in the legs and difficulty walking because so many hours on their feet; underage workers; improperly disposed-of hazardous waste; falsified records; a callous disregard for workers’s health; lax or unenforced labor safety laws; and union busting.2
- Charles Duhigg y Keith Bradsher, “How the U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work,” New York Times, January 21, 2012, https://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/business/apple-america-and-a-squeezed-middle-class.html ↩︎
- Hedges and Sacco, Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt, 72. ↩︎
Leave a Reply