“Americans have become used to the fact that most of the jobs created by Apple are in China,” Clyde Prestowitz writes for CNN. “We know that Steve Jobs told President Barack Obama that ‘those jobs aren’t coming back.’ Recently, an executive at Apple said that the company has no obligation to solve America’s problems by moving some of those jobs back to the United States.”
“As a business, Apple has a right to fear that moving the assembly work from China to the United States will entail raising labor costs so high as to make the company less competitive and profitable,” Prestowitz writes. “But for it to say that it has no obligation to help solve America’s problems is completely unacceptable.”
Prestowitz writes, “Virtually every piece of technology in any Apple product had its origin or was partially developed on the basis of a U.S. government-funded program. In a global world where piracy of products is commonplace, Apple, like other multinationals, has continuously pressed the U.S. government to enforce copyright and patent laws to protect its intellectual property from international theft. Does Apple owe anything to Uncle Sugar? You betchum. Big time.”
“Skeptics are right to point out that moving the factory assembly operations to the United States is a nonstarter as long as we continue to have free trade with China. These kinds of jobs are labor-intensive, and the differential in the cost of labor between America and China is just too large. But this is not where the real value or the good jobs we want for Americans lies,” Prestowitz writes. “The assembly value in an iPhone is only about $7. The real treasure-trove is in the parts. For example, the displays, the processors, memory chips and other key electronic components comprise nearly half of the value of the iPhone. These components require intensive capital and technology investments, but they do not require a great amount of labor. In other words, they can all be produced in America.”
Read more in the full article here.
Clyde Prestowitz is the founder and president of Economic Strategy Institute. A former counselor to the commerce secretary in the Reagan administration, Prestowitz is the author of “The Betrayal of American Prosperity” and blogs about the global economy at Foreign Policy.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews readers too numerous to mention individually for the heads up.]
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