Apple: 514,000 US Jobs Created
apple.com
apple.com
seriously, this is PR out of control, yet there are those who will look at this and say 'Apple employs 1/2 million americans'.
Note, they include the people who 'build the planes and trucks' (I didn't realize the page scrolled at first).
Seriously, if you're a multinational getting static for your global manufacturing organization from miscellaneous congreesspeople who don't understand economics, what tabulation methodology would you choose to make your point?
Edit: note, obviously that they don't include all employees of the corps that make planes and deliver boxes, just the share of employees that exist to serve the volume of business that Apple creates. This is not RIAA style accounting.
Having a headline about "Creating jobs" next to a map with a number that isn't actually the number of jobs created is misleading.
It's more complicated than that.
By the same logic Foxconn could argue that it's creating jobs because it makes things that get shipped around as well.
I'm curious as to how they determine the number of jobs created via their app economy.
Many of the jobs they list do not belong to them and they may actually play a small part in the job itself. Unless they own the transportation company they can't lay claim to the truck driver's job since he's probably delivering stuff for other companies at the same time.
How did Apple create or support healthcare jobs?
People working to build their stores is a short-term deal. Similar to the truck driver example, unless they own the construction company they can't take credit for the entire job.
I'm not saying they cannot lay claim to a great deal of success because most of what they say is probably true. But unless they break the numbers down to realistic examples of jobs created and jobs supported then the numbers they provide is misleading. Especially when they just lump them all together into one big number that makes them look good.
To summarise, they highlight 514k US jobs created of supported by Apple. Now the two operative word in that sentence is "US", and "supported".
1. Direct jobs created for US citizens who are on Apple's payroll is a fraction of this. (47k), so about 9%.
2. They say US jobs, because do you realise how much they outsource?
I personally don't have a major issue with outsourcing. Go where ever the labour is cheap. (And in Apples defence they do try and stay as transparent as possible with Foxconn and employee treatment ethics).
Obama asked Jobs directly once, "what will it take to bring Apple manufacturing back to the States". That is never going to happen. But again, I don't have an issue with that, but spinning their profiteering into philanthropy is utter crock-shit.
Do you realise the jobs they are listing within their "supporting" grouping?
- Business Sales
- Healthcare
- Customer Sales
- Transportation
Who are they including in this? BestBuy employees? The 40% of private Doctors that now say they use as iPad professionally and the FedEx employees who ship the goods on overnight freight?
I'm just suprised they left off the pilots who carry the cargo. They could have squeezed another 400 jobs into that number for sure.
Ultimately, 99% of these people all had jobs before Apple. The truck driver delivered his goods. The healthcare professional was still practicing and the salesmen were still selling. (How by the way does Apple create healthcare jobs?)
Don't read this for anything more than it is. PR bullshit.
Do you know what Apple doesn't want? Some campaign runner trying to decrease US unemployment numbers by saying that the largest US technology company needs to start employing more people. This is a pre-emptive PR measure.
The rest of your accounting complaints are simply not true. If Apple represents 1% of UPS delivery business, they can rightfully claim to have created 1% of the UPS delivery person jobs.
And of course it's PR. It's PR designed to counteract some clueless congresspeople asking for economic impossibilities from a very visible US success story. But it's honest PR. Such things do exist.
Absolutely nothing. I have zero issue with having overseas employees. I'm not even American. The point and issue I was trying to address is that they are trying to cast themselves in some golden light as being the crusader of US employment, when a vast majority of jobs which could be brought back to the US aren't.
I would love to agree in that it is honest PR, perhaps if the word hyperbolic was put in the middle that might be true. Because they have clearly stretched these numbers quite considerably. As one commenter adds below, why not include the farmer who feeds the cows, who feeds the truck driver?
( I would also argue that perhaps the right way to present information to congressmen requires one to have the patience to sincerely explain to them what the situation really is rather than deliberately misleading them)
I agree that the layman's interpretation of "created or supported" isn't necessarily the same as the formal definition of the terms by the US govt, but criticizing Apple for using the formal definition isn't reasonable.
The intent of the formal definition is to answer the question "what would be the impact on US employment if this business were to cease operation tomorrow?", and I believe that Apple has made an honest effort to compute that number, probably rather conservatively.
Perhaps you disagree, but you seem to be arguing against semantic interpretation of the terminology, instead of being skeptical of the results.
In response to your point about how to present this data to congresspeople, I'd argue that while there are some legitimate economic dunces in elected office, there are few that don't comprehend the cascade effect of business activity and therefore employment. Furthermore, I doubt that any congressperson would consider Apple's use of "create or support" to be misleading, because it is absolutely the standard usage of the term in these sorts of assessments. That does not, of course, mean that some senator who smells television coverage won't take notice of the confusion and grandstand his or her condescension for his or her electorate. It might even be a successful strategy, but we don't have to help.
Obviously I haven't audited the numbers. That's a valid line of inquiry, but history shows Apple to be fastidiously circumspect in such matters. There's a new sheriff in town in Cupertino, but if anything he seems to be even more careful.
That's precisely what I'm saying. I don't doubt Apple's contribution to the US economy in terms of the indirect jobs that it has created, but placing it in the same category as creating direct jobs is what I don't agree with (especially since the layman usually interprets it as the latter).
And, if you read the page (which is a hundred times more detailed than the average "create or support" release), Apple makes it pretty darn clear how the numbers break down, direct/indirect. If Apple was less clear, we wouldn't even be having this conversation because we'd just be wondering about it without enough information to form opinions.
Forthcomingness is the new dishonesty, I guess. :)
Well, I'm sorry to hear that FedEx and UPS are responsible for creating far fewer jobs than I previously thought.
http://www.outsaurus.com/2011/08/01/outsourced-apple-500000-...