

Apple: 514,000 US Jobs Created - siglesias
http://www.apple.com/about/job-creation/

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pedalpete
why not include the farmers who raised the cattle that fed the hamburger to
the truck driver.

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).

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quesera
Standard accounting practice, developed by the US govt explicitly for this
purpose.

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.

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mcantelon
>what tabulation methodology would you choose to make your point?

Having a headline about "Creating jobs" next to a map with a number that isn't
actually the number of jobs created is misleading.

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quesera
I disagree. The volume of business that Apple creates for UPS, etc, literally
creates these jobs. That's neither dishonest nor misleading, in my opinion,
but I agree that the first time I saw an "economic impact assessment" that
included such a large number of jobs, I assumed the implication was that the
company in question had these people directly on payroll.

It's more complicated than that.

~~~
mcantelon
>The volume of business that Apple creates for UPS, etc, literally creates
these jobs.

By the same logic Foxconn could argue that it's creating jobs because it makes
things that get shipped around as well.

~~~
quesera
That's simply not correct. Foxconn creates zero consumer demand. Consumer
demand creates jobs.

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talmand
I'd like to see the research supporting these numbers.

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.

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chrisacky
This is beyond pathetic. Who exactly are Apple trying to impress with this?

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.

~~~
quesera
You are not making sense. Apple sells more product outside the US, too, so
who's to begrudge them having a large percentage of employees overseas?

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.

~~~
pm90
You are right that its PR, but please don't argue about it being "Honest". The
common use of the term "Creating Jobs" is only those "directly employed" by
your company (i.e on your company's payroll). In this context, including other
indirect jobs is misleading and hence dishonest.

( 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)

~~~
quesera
This is the point, though.

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.

~~~
pm90
>Perhaps you disagree, but you seem to be arguing against semantic
interpretation of the terminology, instead of being skeptical of the results.

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).

~~~
quesera
I think the message Apple is trying to get across is identical to the standard
usage of the terms, which is to measure the effect of Apple on US employment.
Do you really think they are trying to trick people with (standard)
terminology? Direct employment numbers are in every quarterly report, do you
think they were hoping the lazy Apple press would overlook a huge employment
increase?

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. :)

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bberrry
One Jobs was enough, this is a nightmare.

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Maascamp
"For example, this figure also includes... FedEx and UPS employees."

Well, I'm sorry to hear that FedEx and UPS are responsible for creating far
fewer jobs than I previously thought.

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starfox
Apple doesn't want one of these presidential hopefuls to start campaigning on
the platform that the second largest US company needs to start creating jobs
in the US.

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zerostar07
Americans should be thanking Foxconn for supporting more than 50,000,000
American jobs. Way to go foxconn!

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iamtoby2003
how many jobs do they create oversea?

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gscott
FoxConn has (apparently) about 920,000 employees. Assuming 1/3rd of them work
only making Apple products then triple that number based upon the ancillary
jobs supporting those employees (any sub manufacturing) like how Apple's
website calculates I think it would end up being 920,000 people have jobs in
China because of Apple.

[http://www.outsaurus.com/2011/08/01/outsourced-
apple-500000-...](http://www.outsaurus.com/2011/08/01/outsourced-
apple-500000-jobs/)

~~~
RandallBrown
1/3rd seems really high. FoxConn makes lots of other things besides Apple
Products.

~~~
pm90
Besides, the disparity of labor costs makes it difficult to make a comparison
between "number of Jobs"

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gscott
But the employees labor 60 hours a week, you can essentially count them as 1.5
employees.

