Not the Apple of US eye - Boston Herald

The recent announcement from Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook, that Apple will be moving production of some Macintosh computers back to the United States met a wave of excitement. As Americans, we have learned to rejoice about anything that is creating more jobs here.

Apple seems to have noticed the sluggish state of the economy and perhaps wants to make up for some of the jobs lost to the company’s previous outsourcing with so-called “re-shoring.”.

Others see the announcement as a humanitarian move. Apple has been criticized for enabling human rights violations overseas in factories where its products are produced. This reached a climax earlier this year when reports of horrendous conditions at factories operated by Foxconn became public. Apple faced a small- scale boycott in response to news that 137 Foxconn workers had been injured by chemicals used to clean iPhone screens and that another four employees were killed by an explosion atin an iPad factory as a result of insufficient supervision.

As the largest company in the world, Apple has become a symbol of corporate power and abuse. Accordingly many find it refreshing to see this humanitarian concern finally hit home as Apple claims accountability for its actions.

However, these are both naïve interpretations of Apple’s actions. Apple is a business, and its decision to “re-shore” jobs is neither a selfless act meant to restore American manufacturing to its former glory nor some humanitarian move to protect Chinese workers. It’s simply a business decision.

To understand why Apple made this move, we must remember why they are in China in the first place: opportunity cost. China has historically been appealing as a manufacturing center because it is a developing country with a labor supply that far outweighs domestic demand for its services. For millions of Chinese, the next best alternative to a job at a factory like Foxconn’s is likely even less appealing. This is to say, for any given Foxconn worker, had they been unable to get that job, they would have had to take a job with lower pay, worse conditions or simply would have been unemployed. The small opportunity cost to these workers has produced a large incentive to companies like Apple to outsource low-skill manufacturing jobs to China instead of hiring U.S. workers to snap the aluminum screens onto its MacBooks.

But that has changed. Rumor has it that the new jobs Mr. Cook mentioned will be only about 200 or so very technical jobs, primarily operating advanced robots that produce these computers. It has been speculated that this technology is replacing the need for many of these workers altogether.

However, it seems that another factor is in play as well. The Chinese economy has been growing at about 10 percent every year for the past 30 years while population has stayed relatively stable. As the domestic demand for labor in China has grown to match the supply and as the Chinese infrastructure continues to develop and is better able to protect labor rights, the availability of cheap, and easily abused labor is slowly being eliminated.

China isn’t some humanitarian project that the United States needs to watch out for. It’s position as a country vulnerable target of abuse by American corporations is disappearing quickly. China is the second largest economy in the world behind us, and it’s growing far faster than the United States.

The news of Tim Cook bringing jobs back to the United States shouldn’t be seen as a humanitarian deed for Chinese workers, a compassionate gift for Americans, or even a media stunt pandering to those who do. Rather, it should come more as a wake- up call to the reality that China is catching up and will soon be home to more companies like Apple than the United States.

Brian Tripp lives in Cambridge and is a student at Columbia University.