Apple claims its 'innovation' creates 514,000 US jobs Apple has launched a web page entitled "Creating jobs through innovation" that cites what it claims are statistics that show it's responsible for creating or supporting 514,000 jobs in the US. According to Apple, a study by the Analysis Group determined that Cook & Co. has "directly or indirectly" created 304,000 jobs spread …
... also they dont have include all those who been killed production line & factory 'accidents', on 3rd world wages (and i bet they dont get employee life insurance), but hey, theyre not American so they didnt count them anyway...
its very sad, but for apple sure does help the profit margin.
Somebody sure sucked a lemon...
"but also by decimating such competitors as RIM, HP's webOS team"
Well RIM is Canadian. But anyway...
You could also argue that these companies are slipping and these jobs would have gone to Samsung, Nokia and Huawei etc. But thankfully, Apple stepped up and kept the industry in USA.
See. It is all a matter of how you spin things.
Complaining that Apple does not make more stuff in USA and could do better is just being churlish. Nobody else in makes competing products in USA - why should Apple?
I'm not particularly pro-Apple, but face it people - their competitors in USA killed themselves. Apple didn't have to do anything.
>Complaining that Apple does not make more stuff in USA and could do better is just being churlish. Nobody else in makes competing products in USA - why should Apple?
I don't think that is the point, its the fact that Apple boast about the (ficticious) number of jobs they create. This looks like a response to all the recent bad publicity about worker conditions in China, Its a PR droids response, deflect criticism by showing how wonderful they are for the Merkin economy (c'mon guys, who cares about a few dead chinamen when we get this much benefit)
No, this is not a response to the articles on worker conditions in China.
It's a response to the NYT's iEconomy series titled "How the U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work" [*]
so the OP's point is quite valid.
[*] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/business/apple-america-and-a-squeezed-middle-class.html
First off, I'm incredibly surprised that Apple is pulling a defensive maneuver like this. Don't they usually just not give a crap what people think? So why bother bragging about how many jobs you've created in the US?
Second, does anyone else think statistics like this are always bogus? Unless those people have a skillset that is only valuable at Apple and no other company, they'll find employment elsewhere. Tech companies can't get enough employees, so it's not like they're drawing from an oversaturated market.
Third, healthcare? Really? Is it just me, or are they seriously claiming that because their employees get sick, then by the transitive property they're responsible for employing doctors and the like? If Apple were a man, his ego would rival George Clooney's.
So those employees who get healthcare through being an Apple employee wouldn't have that healthcare if they worked elswhere and therefore those people providing healthcare would be unemployed ? Think about it for a moment.
If it looks like sh*t and tastes like sh*t then.... its marketing droid BS
Many of the 27,000 something employees working in Apple retail wouldn't, because you'll find not many retail employers give full health insurance to part-time staff and even less hire full-timers.
Not saying this isn't marketing, of course it is - it's a direct PR response to a very critical article published in the NYT that implied Apple wasn't creating enough jobs in the US.
However as far as these numbers go I think they're sound. You can claim all you want that these people would work elsewhere, but that doesn't change the fact that these people are currently being employed directly and indirectly by Apple in the US - and there's probably a good reason they picked Apple and not another employer.
How many levels of indirection would it take for you to call them on it? So an Apple employee gets sick and goes to see a doctor. The doctor then goes on to build a house. The construction worker building his house goes and buys some vegetables from a local farmer. This can go on forever. Is Apple directly responsible for all of these people's welfare? Why bother stopping at healthcare? Why not mention everything else? By the same logic you can say "the people buying Apple products are responsible for..." and then list off everything Apple claims it's responsible for.
Now's when you say "duh, this is how economies work," to which I say, exactly. For Apple to claim responsibility for the fundamental nature of the economy takes an ego beyond belief.
It's election year, politicos are getting unsettled by the economy climbing up shit creek to slowly so there is likely to be "bring manufacturing to America" as part of (re)election promises on the cards.
This will play merry hell with Tim Cook victorian labor condition reenactment fetish so it is not surprising that he has ordered the PR on the offensive.
As far as the statistics being bogus they are bogus on a completely different plane. Modern developed world manufacturing creates a nice thick social cushion in the form of a middle class. It is pretty much all qualified jobs - not real blue collar. That is social stability. It may not be social stability to the liking of people like Mr Cook but it is good for the country overall. Replacing that with a few thousands of real white collar or management jobs and tens of thousands of Wallmart/Tesco McJob service serfs does not provide social stability. Just the opposite - it creates a powder keg. The riots in the UK showed that very well. By the way - politicos finally started groking this. A bit too little too late, but better late than never.
And the entitlement culture is product of what?
Dismantling the manufacturing by Mrs "And the vegetables will have the same". The dismantling of social stability as a result of dismantling the "blueish collar" middle class is one long term product of Thatcherism (and her "New LieBore" copycats) which we will have to eat for many many many years.
By the way, there were not just "benefit fiends" doing the riots. If you look through the arrest lists you will see anything starting from engineers from one well known telecoms company and finishing with "olympic ambassadors".
.........and simply regard it as PR from a major example of "BigCorp", things become a little clearer. In very recent times (the Occupy movement etc etc.) the whole issue of the way BigCorp has hollowed out American industry and exported jobs to sweated labour employers in third world countries has become a major political hot potato in the States. BigCorp is feeling the heat and is feeling somewhat defensive these days given that the political mood music is nowhere near as friendly as it once was only a few years back. Apple are merely one high profile example but that is the point - they are very high profile. They cultivate that profile assiduously as part of marketing the company and its products - very successfully. That success however has placed them in the position of becoming something of a poster boy for this whole very controversial series of issues. As far as I am concerned seeing any example of BigCorp being hoist upon their own marketing petard causes me a certain degree of wry amusement.
So out of the nearly $12.5B for Apple's cost ($15.7B revenue, 3.25B profit) how much of that went to the 500k+ jobs?
Dare I ask how much of that revenue went to taxes and how much came from "small business" programs? No, I suppose I shouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth. Now then, is it going to be a stock split or a dividend? Myself and the other 0.999% want to know.
While I agree that firms have overused the Innovation card, am I the only one who finds it odd that the Reg would rant about overusing words and phrases?! Off hand I can think of many Reg favorites that have been run into the ground: fanboi, fondleslab, boffin, freetard, commentard, punter, etc. I'm sure regular readers can think of dozens more.
Oh my, aren't you a courageous one. *cough*
ps: Could you summarise your posts instead of making 5 separate ones? You seem to post one right after the other - or are you after the top commentard prize for this article?
Try to organise your thoughts a bit better, I suggest writing them down first , waiting 30 minutes and *then* posting.
Why do you assume everyone who hates Apple, loves Google?
I personally hate both. Yes, I hate Apple more than Google, but only in the sense that Mt Everest is higher than K2. I'm personally working towards getting completely out of the IT industry because I'm sick of what these two corporations have done to it. Clouds, walled gardens, software installations restricted to app stores, closed silos, insidious privacy invasion, remote control of our devices, endless patent wars - they've turned what was once an engaging and stimulating field into a mountain-sized steaming pile of shit.
I actually think the 514,000 is underestimated, Apple only counts direct and immediately connected jobs, however there's a lot more jobs just an extra step away.
Like the author of this article for example, who supplements his income writing books about Apple and was not so long ago employed as the editor-in-chief of a Mac magazine.
There's hardly a day Apple is not on the news. The media is busy with them. What about those business analysts too? The list of related jobs is endless - and a lot of them in the US.
We could even consider the mobile engineers working on upgrading their networks to cope with the iPhone user's data usage, AT&T put its network upgrades on overdrive for a good while to cope with previously unseen mobile data traffic. Even recently T-Mobile USA announced they are spending $4B to get their network ready for the iPhone
Maybe the Analsys Group could have included all these in their study and drive the headline figure the millions. But they were honest and didn't.
The IT industry would exist without Apple. The comms industry would exist without Apple.
So even without Apple, those comms industry workers and IT workers would still be doing more-or-less what they are doing now. People would still be writing books and business analysts would still still be analysing businesses.
If Apple were suddenly teleported into the centre of the sun, their place on Earth would be filled in like a hole in the water.
One of the most striking things to learn about human affairs is that nothing and nobody is indispensable. Life would continue much the same without them.
Please also learn to recognise marketing bullshit when you see it.
It’s also worth noting that all of these jobs are well paid: well paid in comparison to those assembly line jobs that are all in China that is. A reasonable if rough calculation would have those half million jobs in the US paying perhaps 10 times as many dollars each as those quarter million jobs in China*. If even roughly true that implies that there’s 20 times as much money going to labour in the US as a result of Apple than there is going to labour in China. If there’s going to be an international division of labour at all then it looks like the US is on the right end of this deal, no?
*Inaccurate, yes, but close enough. Those Chinese jobs are paying $3,000 to $6,000 a year each, depending on who you talk to. Retail in the US doesn’t pay all that well but $30-60k a year for the spread between store employees and apps developers seems reasonable.
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1. Apple builds a time machine.
2. They use it to go back in time to 2002.
3. They kill all the fuckwits and reprobates that caused all the jobs being lost in the ten years leading up to this year of the lord 2012.
You know who I'm talking about: political enablers like Bush and Greenspan in the States and Blair and Brown in the UK; and all the financial "wizards" from Goldman Sachs and Bank of America and Royal Bank of Scotland etc. pushing CDOs and sub-prime mortgages and tranches and all of the financial scams we saw in the last decade. [1]
I don't care how Apple does it: cyanide, bullets, TNT. Just cap the fuckers. Do that, and you haven't just created an extra 500,000 jobs - you've stopped millions of jobs being lost in the first place around_the_world. [2]
Maybe I'm being facetious with my solution. There are problems with it. For example, one major flaw is that time machines don't exist. But you must agree that my solution is "Innovative" with a capital I in bold 72 px Times New Roman font. It's certainly more innovative than rounded corners or hiring more patent lawyers.
The problem is not that these things are or are not innovative. They aren't. The problem is that Apple needs to pretend that these things are innovative to such a degree that they are advertising themselves to an _unseemly_ level. I don't understand why. It shows a level of insecurity in the company.
Apple should not be that insecure. Apple does not need to be that insecure. They make products that are appreciated by millions. They do stuff. They should be proud of that, and stop spending millions on campaigns wanking on about their "Innovation".
Am I right or am I right?
[1] While they're there, Apple could point out to a younger, more living Steve Jobs that there are no "alternative therapies" for Pancreatic cancer. No successful ones anyway.
[2] This shows the percentage jobs lost in the States for all the post WWII recessions. Notice which one is not like the others.
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-EQhAKiXaEJQ/TyvqgkFWwSI/AAAAAAAAMDM/G_ErFTiSxkM/s1600/PercentJobLossesJan2012.jpg
They will always try to do their jobs regardless of company.
Layers at Apple will search for apad to zpad and then from apadd to zpadd and then continue with phonetic "problems" and why not with abad to zbad.
I am sure they will surprise us in the future too
Marketing will tell how Apple has saved the US and world economy and so on.
Years ago there was an article claiming that if people moved from Windows to open source and linux one million IT jobs would disappear in Europe.
That was quite funny considering the fact that Microsoft claimed that more people are needed to take care of linux, also one would assume that the people working with IT would simply move to work with linux and open source.
So, calm down, this is the way it works and as long as we know it, it does not matter much.
I have not forgotten the patent layers but I now need an ipi** and an ibeer.
1) Replace all electronic communication by runners.
2) Replace all corporate computers by rooms full of clerks with Ready-Reckoners and filing cabinets.
3) Replace all power stations by men in treadmills.
4) Replace all recorded music by live performers.
5) Replace all cameras by artists.
6) Replace all forms of transport by men rolling stuff on logs
............. Oh wait! The Greens are already have these targets.
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