21Nov2011

Apple’s real market value: How many U.S. jobs it creates

The death of Steve Jobs was followed by an avalanche of superlatives – brilliant, genius, and visionary among the more common. He was likened to Leonardo da Vinci, Albert Einstein, and Thomas Edison,” Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele write for The Philadelphia Inquirer.

“But in the case of Edison, there was one significant difference that went unmentioned. For more than a century, just one of Edison’s inventions alone – the incandescent lightbulb – was manufactured at numerous locations in the United States, providing employment for millions of Americans across family generations,” Barlett and Steele write. “The Apple home computer, not at all. After only one generation, all the Apple manufacturing jobs in America disappeared, as the work of building and assembling the machines was turned over to laborers in sweatshops in China and other countries. Jobs that should have provided employment for Americans for decades to come were terminated.”

Barlett and Steele write, ” Rather than open new plants in other U.S. cities and expand existing operations, the company, as other computer- and electronics-makers were also doing, moved production offshore, largely to China.”

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