http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/business/apple-america-and-a-squeezed-middle-class.html?_r=2&pagewanted=1as
Steven P. Jobs of Apple spoke, President Obama interrupted with an inquiry of his own: what would it take to make iPhones in the United States?
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,”
This is where Mr Obama fails miserable. He is suppose to be a leader. What he should have said was Mr. Jobs with all due respect those manufacturing jobs will be coming back. I am going to force you to bring them back. I am going to drop a $300.00 tarriff on every Iphone coming to the United States that is not manufactured in the United States. I am going to drop the same tariff on all your competition too. I know most of your cell phones are sold in the USA. If you want to keep that market you need to do your part for the country. If you don’t want the tariff then you need to manufacture here. That is how it is going to go. Now pass the green beans.
We need Obama to be a leader not a fricken p*ssy!
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.
Last year, it earned over $400,000 in profit per employee, more than Goldman Sachs, Exxon Mobil or Google.
Apple employs
43,000 people in the United States and 20,000 overseasMany more people work for Apple’s contractors: an additional 700,000 people engineer, build and assemble iPads, iPhones and Apple’s other products
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.
Americans aren’t willing to live in dormitories. Or work 12 hour shifts at a moments notice. Chinese don’t want to do it either. They would rather jump off the roof and kill themselves but the government won’t let them. So if Americans want to compete the US Government must step in. It is the only way this gets fixed.
“Companies once felt an obligation to support American workers, even when it wasn’t the best financial choice,”
companies argue they need to move work where it can generate enough profits to keep paying for innovation. $400,000 in profit per employee isn’t enough?????
Doing otherwise risks losing even more American jobs over time
I love this argument. WE HAVE TO GET RID OF US JOBS SO WE DON’T LOSE MORE US JOBS. They think we are really stupid.
“We don’t have an obligation to solve America’s problems.”
The Chinese government had agreed to underwrite costs for numerous industries, and those subsidies had trickled down to the glass-cutting factory.
How is this not a tariff on American workers. The Chinese government is helping to drive down the cost of making things in China. If the US government did this the Chinese would complain to the WTO and the USA would be punished. The Chinese do it all the time and nobody says boo. We are told that is how capitalism works.
The facility has 230,000 employees, many working six days a week, often spending up to 12 hours a day at the plant. Over a quarter of Foxconn’s work force lives in company barracks and many workers earn less than $17 a day. When one Apple executive arrived during a shift change, his car was stuck in a river of employees streaming past. “The scale is unimaginable,” he said.
it assembles an estimated 40 percent of the world’s consumer electronics for customers like Amazon, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Motorola, Nintendo, Nokia, Samsung and Sony.
“What U.S. plant can find 3,000 people overnight and convince them to live in dorms?”
cut glass arrived at Foxconn City in the dead of night, according to the former Apple executive. That’s when managers woke thousands of workers, who crawled into their uniforms — white and black shirts for men, red for women — and quickly lined up to assemble, by hand, the phones. Within three months, Apple had sold one million iPhones. Since then, Foxconn has assembled over 200 million more.
Companies like Apple “say the challenge in setting up U.S. plants is finding a technical work force
LIAR!
paying American wages would add up to $65 to each iPhone’s expense.
I think every American would be willing to pay an extra $65 for an iphone to be made in the USA. Lets do it.
“We could make the glass here, and then ship it by boat, but that takes 35 days. Or, we could ship it by air, but that’s 10 times as expensive. So we build our glass factories next door to assembly factories, and those are overseas.”
Ohhhh shipping it is the problem. I see……
“What they really want are 30-year-olds without children,” said Mr. Saragoza, who today is 48, and whose family now includes five of his own.
After a few months of looking for work, he started feeling desperate. Even teaching jobs had dried up. So he took a position with an electronics temp agency that had been hired by Apple to check returned iPhones and iPads before they were sent back to customers. Every day, Mr. Saragoza would drive to the building where he had once worked as an engineer, and for $10 an hour with no benefits, wipe thousands of glass screens and test audio ports by plugging in headphones.
The biggest rewards, however, have often gone to Apple’s top employees. Mr. Cook, Apple’s chief, last year received
stock grants — which vest over a 10-year period — that, at today’s share price, would be worth $427 million, and his salary was raised to $1.4 million. In 2010, Mr. Cook’s compensation package was valued at $59 million, according to Apple’s security filings.
“We shouldn’t be criticized for using Chinese workers,” a current Apple executive said. “The U.S. has stopped producing people with the skills we need.”
LIAR! America has stopped producing workers willing to work 6 days a week 12 hours a day for $17.00. Tell the truth.
I’m not worried about the country’s long-term future,” Mr. Jobs told Mr. Obama, according to one observer. “This country is insanely great. What I’m worried about is that we don’t talk enough about solutions.”
TARIFFS! I talk about them all the time.
At dinner, for instance, the executives had suggested that the government should reform visa programs to help companies hire foreign engineers. Some had urged the president to give companies a “tax holiday” so they could bring back overseas profits which, they argued, would be used to create work. Mr. Jobs even suggested it might be possible, someday, to locate some of Apple’s skilled manufacturing in the United States if the government helped train more American engineers.
Apple is too poor to train people?
