At Bloomberg Adam Minter is skeptical about the prospects for Apple’s bringing the production of iPhones to the United States:
Low labor costs and minimal regulation were certainly part of China’s appeal. But the most important factor was its huge and nimble workforce. The main iPhone facility in Zhengzhou now employs 110,000 workers, with other factories employing hundreds of thousands more. China’s 270 million migrant laborers — most of them ambitious and opportunistic — have proven indispensable to a business that prizes flexibility. Last summer, Apple contractors reportedly hired 100,000 workers to ramp up production of the iPhone 6s in advance of its fall release.
Nothing comparable could ever happen in the U.S., no matter what the president wants. A mass mobilization on that scale, and at that speed, likely hasn’t been attempted since World War II. And there’s little reason to think it would be successful or desirable today, even if Apple was willing to try.
Finding enough skilled labor wouldn’t be much easier. Apple CEO Tim Cook told “60 Minutes” last year that, thanks to better vocational education, China now has a more skillful workforce than the U.S. Apple’s executives estimate that they’d need 8,700 industrial engineers to oversee 200,000 assembly line workers, yet only 7,000 students completed university-level industrial-engineering programs in the U.S. in 2014. Shenzhen, by contrast, is home to 240,000 Foxconn employees — and millions of additional engineers and laborers.
He may be overstating the problem a little. I don’t know that anybody is suggesting that all iPhones be made in the U. S. and last year more iPhones were sold in China than in the U. S.
However, if I were in Tim Cook’s shoes I’d be looking around for second sources for iPhone manufacturers, if only for leverage against the Chinese, their notoriously predatory attitude towards intellectual property, and their obvious desire to have Chinese people buy Chinese branded products.
Wall Street somehow had little problem finding people with enough technical ability to create mathematical models and computer applications for them to rule the world, but then, they paid a little more than chicken feed.
Somehow, the illegal aliens (I’m sorry “undocumented laborers”) can reconfigure themselves to do any job an American refuses to pay a decent wage to get done.
I have no doubt that the money grubbers know exactly what they are doing, but the others (such as Adam Minter) are too stupid to come in out the rain.
Americans are among the smartest people in the world. If there is no incentive to an education, the rest of the world is too stupid to divert their energy to something else.
Americans can somehow manufacture Boeing airplanes, but they are too stupid to manufacture the iPhone. What Adam Minter, with his genius IQ, has not considered is that he is beyond obsolete. Any illegal alien or overseas worker can bang on a keyboard, and with spelling and grammar checking, his is a job Americans will not do.
The simple answer is to fix the monetary system, and Tim Cook will change his mind overnight.
That’s exactly right. You know where the incentives are? The most highly protected sectors.