The True Cost of Outsourcing

Currently on the Apple website there is a video entitled “Designed by Apple in California”. Why is this not entitled something like “Built by Apple in California” or “Created by Apple in California, or even something as straight forward as “Manufactured by Apple in California”? This is because any one of these examples would not be truthful. According to Entrepreneur.com, Apple outsources its product manufacturing not to save money but to save time. Let’s take a moment and think about what that means. Apple has decided to take jobs from Americans and move them to Asian countries such as: Mongolia, Taiwan, and China. “The period to hire 8,700 engineers to manage 200,000 factory workers is: 09 Months in the US and 15 days in China” (Entrpreneur.com) In 2011 the “Apple pie” was cut into three slices, there were 700,000 foreign-held jobs, 43,000 US held jobs and 20,000 US-held jobs abroad.

Based on the information provided, Apple moved out of the United States not for fear of losing their company; or to stay in business but to cut down production time, to please stock holders and to maintain the CEO’s inflated salary, case in point Apple CEO Tim Cook, makes "$1,400,000 annually" (Forbes.com), that’s $3835.61 per day. “Worldwide, its stores sold $16 billion in merchandise. But most of Apple’s employees enjoyed little of that wealth… About 30,000 of the 43,000 Apple employees in this country work in Apple Stores, as members of the service economy, and many of them earn about $25,000 a year.” (Forbes.com) If the true cost of outsourcing is American jobs in order to save time for a multi-billion dollar corporation; is it worth it?