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Photo: Flickr / atmtx
The Sunday New York Times today features an investigation into the state of US manufacturing, but specifically related to the production of Apple products, and how, over time, it has shifted overseas. It reveals a lot about the future of middle-class America (something also applicable to Australia), and also the sheer magnitude of the Apple manufacturing process. For example, the article reveals that more than 200,000 assembly-line workers are involved in putting together the iPhone in China.
Check out this story about a last-minute change in the iPhone, switching from plastic to glass screen, and how the Foxconn plant, Apple’s primary Chinese manufacturer, responded:
“They could hire 3,000 people overnight,” said Jennifer Rigoni, who was Apple’s worldwide supply demand manager until 2010, but declined to discuss specifics of her work. “What U.S. plant can find 3,000 people overnight and convince them to live in dorms?”
In mid-2007, after a month of experimentation, Apple’s engineers finally perfected a method for cutting strengthened glass so it could be used in the iPhone’s screen. The first truckloads of 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.
That’s impossible in America, or indeed any developed nation nowadays. The investigation also highlights something I heard Thomas Friedman speak about when he was in Melbourne last year, and is something explored in his new book (that I’ve been meaning to read): the idea that the top-jobs and the bottom-jobs are safe. Those who are innovators, always able to adapt to a changing market will be able to keep one-step ahead of that change. Those at the ‘bottom’, the “butchers, bakers and candle-stick makers,” as Friedman says, the hyper-local, Main St. service jobs will be kept. The middle is buggered, but getting rid of them should keep the top- and bottom-jobs.
But while Apple is far from alone, it offers a window into why the success of some prominent companies has not translated into large numbers of domestic jobs. [...] To thrive, companies argue they need to move work where it can generate enough profits to keep paying for innovation. Doing otherwise risks losing even more American jobs over time, as evidenced by the legions of once-proud domestic manufacturers — including G.M. and others — that have shrunk as nimble competitors have emerged.
There are some interesting questions to consider as part of this transformation, though. For one, what kind of exploitative practices are employed by these behemoth manufacturers like Foxconn? The toll taken on workers is extreme — 14 workers committed suicide in Foxconn factories in 2010-11 — and their wages and on-going conditions are far from what the standard the job would be at if it were located in America or Australia. But then again, that’s the competitive advantage.
The jobs at many of these factories are highly sought after by Chinese; but that’s no excuse to treat workers poorly, underpay them or provide sub-standard conditions. Apple is arguably one of the more open companies (or at least gives the aura of openness), having now released a report on “Supplier Responsibility”, going into detail that, from what I understand, is greater than the average company of its clout and size.
My take on this is that these are the jobs that, in the world we live in now, need to be geographically transient. We in the Western, developed world need to give them up. Profits drive so many decisions at these multi-nationals, and becomes the grease that turn the wheels of the capitalism that makes us Westerners “rich”, so they’re going whether we like them or not. We need to embrace it.1 It’s up to our governments, as beneficiaries of this, to then provide educationally and socially for its citizens. That means benefits and re-training for those who lose their jobs and the best education system money can buy for those entering the workforce to give us the best shot at keeping those wheels turning.
(Via Daring Fireball)
- The Australian government today, for example, is doing a bad job at that with the local auto industry. To me it just seems doomed to fail. [↩]
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