The New York Times posted an article this past week titled How U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work that got a lot of attention. Pando Daily, Cult of Mac and 9-to-5 Mac chimed in on the subject, and the topic even made it into the Republican Presidential Debate.
The sad fact is that Apple is no different than any other electronics company. Heck, forget electronics; practically everything you can buy at Walmart appears to be made in China.
While Steve Jobs stated at a dinner with President Obama that there aren’t enough skilled workers in America to Apple products in America, and that the current tax situation prevents them from bringing their oil-tankers full of cash back to the U.S., I believe there’s another reason as well.
Apple has stated that the wages paid to workers to build their products aren’t the problem. In fact, analysts claim that the increased American wages would only add around $65 to the cost of an iPhone. but I’m not sure I believe that. The fact is, there aren’t too many Americans who would be willing to work for anywhere near the wages paid to Chinese workers to build the iPhone at Foxconn. Even at U.S. minimum wage, we’re talking about increasing the daily wages of each worker by six times compared to Chinese workers. How would Apple recoup those increased costs without increasing the cost of the iPhone, iPad, iMac and the rest of their products substantially?
Americans who buy Apple products, probably wouldn’t be willing to pay a healthy increase in price for those products – even if the product could claim that it was “made in the USA.”
So while I’m sure that Steve Jobs had valid points when he said there simply weren’t enough skilled workers in the U.S., and that American factories couldn’t move as quickly as foreign ones, it seems to me that this isn’t necessarily the fault of the American education system. What’s the point in getting a $50K education if you can’t use that education here in the U.S. to make a decent living. Companies need to have something to offer potential qualified workers before they bother getting qualified to begin with.
It’s a “chicken or the egg” discussion, really. Until Americans are willing to pay more for products, they will continue to be built elsewhere. But we can’t afford to pay more until those higher paying jobs come back to the U.S.