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Bringing the Apple jobs back home

Fri, 07 Dec 2012 12:45:00 +0000

Tim Cook may not be Steve Jobs, but the new Apple CEO proved this week that he is just as good as the old Apple CEO at getting the media to snap to attention. One carefully calibrated bomb dropped toward the end of a humongous Bloomberg BusinessWeek interview -- that Apple plans to spend $100 million to bring some Mac manufacturing back to the United States in 2013 -- rocketed around the world, from Twitter to the New York Times, in less time than it takes to run down the battery on your iPhone. Who needs Steve Jobs? Real jobs are coming back to America!

The timing was perfect for a growing cohort of economy-watchers eager to make the argument that globalization's malign impact on the American worker has hit high tide and is finally beginning to ebb. Just a week ago, the Atlantic presciently published "The Insourcing Boom," a fascinating in-depth story by Charles Fishman investigating General Electric's decision to start up new appliance assembly lines in the U.S. And "GE is not alone," writes Fishman, arguing that an increasing number of American corporations are discovering it makes economic sense to bring the factories back home. Apple's news was the exclamation point at the end of the Atlantic's sentence.

Apple to resume US manufacturing

Thu, 06 Dec 2012 14:18:00 +0000

Apple is bringing a branch of its manufacturing back within U.S. borders, CEO Tim Cook announced in interviews with Bloomberg Businessweek and NBC's "Rock Center." An existing Mac computer line will be exclusively manufactured in the U.S. said Cook, who took over as CEO from Steve Jobs in August 2011.

Last year, President Obama candidly asked Steve Jobs about the outsourcing of almost all Apple manufacturing jobs overseas.“Those jobs aren’t coming back,” Jobs reportedly told the president. But, according to Cook's announcement, Apple has not abandoned American manufacturing.

"We’ve been working for years on doing more and more in the United States,” the CEO told NBC's Brian Williams. Cook told Businessweek that Apple -- the biggest company in the world by market value -- had a responsibility to create U.S. jobs. He did, however, note that the U.S. education system is failing to produce enough people with the skills needed for modern manufacturing processes.

Foxconn admits to hiring 14-year-olds

Wed, 17 Oct 2012 16:03:00 +0000

Foxconn Technology Group, the world's largest contract electronics maker, has acknowledged hiring children as young as 14 in a Chinese factory. An internal investigation, following allegations from labor rights groups in China, found teenagers younger than the legal working age of 16 at a plant in Yantai, in northeastern Shandong province.

"This is not only a violation of China's labor law, it is also a violation of Foxconn policy and immediate steps have been taken to return the interns in question to their educational institutions," a Foxconn statement announced, according to Reuters. The 56 underage interns found will now be sent back to their schools.

This is not the first labor scandal for Foxconn, Apple Inc.'s largest manufacturer. In Northern China in September a riot broke out at a Foxconn plant assembling iPhones over living conditions at the factory's on-site dormitories. Foxconn has been forced to improve working conditions at a number of its Chinese iPhone and iPad plants following numerous reports of labor abuses and the suicide of 14 Foxconn factory workers in China in 2010.

Apple cans game modeled on Foxconn tech workers’ suicides

Mon, 15 Oct 2012 20:13:00 +0000

In 2010, a series of suicides among workers at a Chinese manufacturing plant that makes iPhones brought worldwide attention to Foxconn — and difficult ethical questions about what's behind some of our most beloved gadgets. At the time, amid charges of "labor camp" conditions, things were so grim at the world's ostensible "biggest electronics maker" — supplying not just Apple but Dell and Hewlett-Packard — the company was driven to install nets to prevent workers from hurling themselves to their deaths. Were the over one dozen suicides over a short period of time an act of protest? Were they the result of stress culminating from the alleged 12-hour days that went into making Apple's first generation iPad? And were we, with our dependence on the newest, shiniest hand-held devices to entertain us, in any way morally accountable for the fates of factory workers half a world away? All intriguing questions. And for answers, naturally, there's an app for that.

Apple supplier halts production after riot

Mon, 24 Sep 2012 10:19:00 +0000

BEIJING (AP) — The company that makes Apple's iPhones suspended production at a factory in China on Monday after a brawl by as many as 2,000 employees at a dormitory injured 40 people.

The fight, the cause of which was under investigation, erupted Sunday night at a privately managed dormitory near a Foxconn Technology Group factory in the northern city of Taiyuan, the company and Chinese police said. A police statement reported by the official Xinhua News Agency said 5,000 officers were dispatched to the scene.

The Taiwanese-owned company declined to say whether the factory was involved in iPhone production. It said the facility, which employs 79,000 people, would suspend work Monday and reopen Tuesday.

Foxconn makes iPhones and iPads for Apple Inc. and also assembles products for Microsoft Corp. and Hewlett-Packard Co. It is one of China's biggest employers, with some 1.2 million workers in factories in Taiyuan, the southern city of Shenzhen, in Chengdu in the west and in Zhengzhou in central China.

The fight in Taiyuan started at 11 p.m. on Sunday, "drawing a large crowd of spectators and triggering chaos," a police spokesman was quoted by Xinhua as saying.