Reason Apple left the US is they couldn't find 3,000 factory workers willing to live in dorms here

[NNN0LHI]

http://www.salon.com/2012/01/30/the_education_crisis_myth/singleton/

Monday, Jan 30, 2012 12:00 PM 13:26:50 CST

The “education crisis” myth

Ignore the media spin. Wages and working conditions -- not skills -- are the real reasons jobs get outsourced

By David Sirota

Has the term “education” become a code word? And if so, a code word for what?

This is the major unasked — but resoundingly answered — question to emerge from two much-discussed articles about the future of American manufacturing. One is a cover story in the Atlantic Monthly about why jobs are being shipped overseas. It concludes that “to solve all the problems that keep people from acquiring skills would require tackling the toughest issues our country faces” — the first of those being “a broken educational system.” The second and even more talked about article comes from the New York Times. It looked at why Apple Computer has moved its production facilities overseas, concluding in sensationalistic fashion that “it isn’t just that workers are cheaper abroad” but that America “has stopped training enough people in the mid-level skills that factories need.”

These pieces were clearly written with a very specific objective in mind: to draw media attention to the supposed “education crisis” in America — a favorite topic of these publications’ elite readers, who have a vested interest in blaming the recession on the poor rather than on the economic policies that enrich the already rich. No doubt, both the Times and the Atlantic achieved their goal, with various NPR shows, cable gabfests and elite magazines spending the last week frothing over the articles’ central thesis. snip

The Times also quotes an Apple executive saying the company must outsource because “the entire supply chain is in China now” — and though the article doesn’t bother to mention it, that is true precisely because other factories in that supply chain have moved to China for the cheap wages and lax human rights/labor regulations. The Times later talks to Eric Saragoza, an American worker laid off by Apple, who says that Apple told him to keep his job he didn’t need to acquire more skills, but instead “to do 12-hour days, and come in on Saturdays.” And in another part of the piece, the Times quotes a former Apple executive who insists Apple was forced to move to China because there’s no “U.S. plant (that) can find 3,000 people overnight and convince them to live in dorms” — an admission, again, that Apple’s move to offshore isn’t about skills, but about a desire to employ a “flexible” (read: exploitable) workforce.*

[leveymg]

1. Cut to the bottom-line: US wages and production cost will be halved before multinationals hire here

again. We'll also have to accept Third World working and environmental conditions. In other words, give up every gain won by unions, the middle-class and environmentalist during the last Century.

We're a flag of convenience with a government, courts, political system, police and military that can be counted upon to uphold the property interests of the One Percent who do simply what they want with the rest.

I'm surprised that any of this is news to anyone.

[onehandle]

2. Most of Apple's manufacturing was done outside of the U.S. long before China.

Mostly in Singapore and Ireland.

This article makes it sound like they shut down a bunch of plants in the U.S. and went straight to Foxconn.

Bull.

Oh, and as always. If you have a phone, a computer, a tablet from any company, it's made in those same plants in China.

[librechik]

3. reason economy in US is fucked: wages frozen for 32 years

apparently that isn't enough, so biz flocks to extra-low wage countries. The pain will continue until businesses realize customers must have money to buy products. Funny, they used to know that. Now they make more money pretending they never heard of that principle. Apple is not helpu ing the US economy, it is helping itself.

[DonCoquixote]

4. Isn't it funny

That the last and larget "communist" country becomes the home of sweatshops?