An Immorality Tale in Three Acts

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When Barack Obama joined Silicon Valley’s top luminaries for dinner in California last February, each guest was asked to come with a question for the president.

But as 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?

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.

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However, the workers assembling iPhones, iPads and other devices often labor in harsh conditions, according to employees inside those plants, worker advocates and documents published by companies themselves. Problems are as varied as onerous work environments and serious — sometimes deadly — safety problems.

Employees work excessive overtime, in some cases seven days a week, and live in crowded dorms. Some say they stand so long that their legs swell until they can hardly walk. Under-age workers have helped build Apple’s products, and the company’s suppliers have improperly disposed of hazardous waste and falsified records, according to company reports and advocacy groups that, within China, are often considered reliable, independent monitors.

More troubling, the groups say, is some suppliers’ disregard for workers’ health. Two years ago, 137 workers at an Apple supplier in eastern China were injured after they were ordered to use a poisonous chemical to clean iPhone screens. Within seven months last year, two explosions at iPad factories, including in Chengdu, killed four people and injured 77. Before those blasts, Apple had been alerted to hazardous conditions inside the Chengdu plant, according to a Chinese group that published that warning.

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Record sales of iPhones and iPads resulted in record profits at Apple in the final quarter of 2011, the first since the death of its co-founder, Steve Jobs.

Apple more than doubled its profits: to $13.06bn (£8.35bn), compared with $6bn for the same quarter in 2010. The result easily beat analysts’ forecasts, taking pressure off the chief executive, Tim Cook, handpicked by Jobs as his successor. Last October Apple shares recorded their biggest single-day dollar drop after iPhone sales missed their forecast.

Nostalgianomics?

Megan McArdle delivers a typically hackish column on Obama’s SOTU address. After noting her TV appearance with such bright bulbs as John Stossel and Gary Johnson, she proceeds to get after Obama for his nostalgic view of the economy. I’m not going to quote at the length necessary to completely eviscerate her points; you can click on the link should you feel the desire to beat your head against a wall. But I will quote this:

Finally, there’s the fact that the 1950s ended in the 1970s. In the 1950s, American products were envied all over the world; by 1980, they were a joke. This is not some radical disconnect; it is the beginning and end of the same process. The technocratic American institutions became sclerotic agents of inertia. Bosses whose pay was capped poured their energy into building personal empires instead of personal fortunes. Unions like the UAW began making demands on their companies so heavy that even the UAW president who had negotiated these amazing pay increases began to fear that his members had lost their minds.

So much just in this one paragraph. The conflation of some shitty cars made by the Big Three in the 1970s with all American products, a stereotype about American manufacturing at best. The gratuitous apologism for maximizing CEO pay (Megan knows her masters). The completely unsourced, uncontextualized, and probably untrue anecdote about the UAW president thinking UAW members are crazy for asking too much of their bosses. The between-the-lines blaming of union pay scales for the supposed decline of American products.

I may be critical of Obama on his economic and labor stances, but let’s be clear–the mid-20th century was the glory years of the American working class precisely because unions were so strong, forcing companies to divert resources from their ivory back-scratchers to worker paychecks. McArdle somehow sees this as counterproductive to the American economy, linking to a blog post making bizarre claims that capping CEO pay causes deep problems in the economy because CEOs are hypermasculine beasts or something and just can’t be stopped. But thirty years of Republican obfuscation of economic reality has failed to cloud one key fact–the only period in American history when working-class people got a fair shake was the precise period when unions were the strongest. She’d rather serve her corporate masters, but we should not be fooled by her capitalist shilling. Obama may not be willing to go all the way in understanding why the 1950s worked and the 2010s don’t work, but he’s at least pointing us in the right direction