Do you know where your iPhone comes from? There’s a good chance it’s from Foxconn’s plant in Zhengzhou China where half a million iPhones are manufactured every day…in a city of newly trained and housed workers in the hundreds of thousands. An arrangement where Foxconn works closely with Chinese government authorities has been fashioned that provides a long list of enabling “goodies”.
Which in turn makes what was previously a backwater an industrial powerhouse for high-tech hardware, providing enormous numbers of jobs, and turning out huge amount of product at “rock bottom” costs. Apple has also managed to route its profits from this enterprise in various ways such that it doesn’t pay the taxes to the USA one might expect.
Perhaps needless to say, but Apple has status as one of the most highly capitalized corporations in the world, and whose profits have been huge, and it’s stock price riding high for some years. Many of those stockholders have made fortunes, while potential jobs and worker salaries, and taxes, have not been forthcoming. Perhaps something will need to be done about this.
How did this occur, which seems so blatantly counter to the interests of the US labor force, not to mention communities and states that could well have used hundreds of thousands of jobs. This article from NYTimes explains a bit of that very interesting conundrum for the future prosperity and stability of the US.
Educators who design programs to enable students to take their productive place in the 21st century economy, might well contemplate how at least part of it works today.
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