What with the rumour mill about
Here's the specific piece of news that makes that point:
A recent rumor suggested that Apple is planning to introduce the iPhone 6 sometime in September, and today another pair of reports have surfaced that appear to back that claim up.
According to Taiwanese publication Economic Daily News, Hon Hai/Foxconn will begin mass production of the 4.7-inch iPhone 6 during the third week of July. Production of the larger 5.5-inch model is expected to get underway during the second week of August.
In order to help meet Apple’s production demands, Foxconn will hire 100,000 workers to ensure that it can manufacture enough iPhone 6 units to meet future demand.
Leave aside those bits that are irrelevant to my point, whether the iPhone 6 will have a 5.5 inch screen, whether it will even be called the iPhone 6, and concentrate on that figure of 100,000 workers. There is simply no way at all that it would be possible to hire 100,000 workers in the US in any one, or even in several, locations between now and the supposed launch of the phone in two month's time.
There's certainly enough unemployed people in the US, that's true, to provide a workforce of that size. But those unemployed are not mobile enough that you could gather that many at any one, or even three or four locations in the country. And it's also true that the basic systems of HR, the hiring process itself, would take longer than that even if you could gather the correct number of people.
The basic model being used to assemble this electronics equipment just wouldn't, and doesn't, work inside the US. The labour market simply isn't built the right way to allow the mobilisation of a sufficiently large workforce in these seasonal surges that a company like Apple faces.
Apple themselves have been saying this for some years now, indeed they've been saying it since the very launch of the original iPhone itself:
Apple executives say that going overseas, at this point, is their only option. One former executive described how the company relied upon a Chinese factory to revamp iPhone manufacturing just weeks before the device was due on shelves. Apple had redesigned the iPhone’s screen at the last minute, forcing an assembly line overhaul. New screens began arriving at the plant near midnight.
A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day.
“The speed and flexibility is breathtaking,” the executive said. “There’s no American plant that can match that.”
It would be possible to have American plants manufacturing things that have a steadier demand. Instead of a huge boom in the early life of a product cycle and then a tailing off of demand as it ages, if there was a more consistent monthly demand then it would be possible to set up a US based supply chain to manufacture. But at the same time, if you don't need that flexibility then that would be just yet another reason to mechanise the process rather than using human labour to do it. Steve Jobs really was right:
Why can’t that work come home? Mr. Obama asked.
Mr. Jobs’s reply was unambiguous. “Those jobs aren’t coming back,” he said, according to another dinner guest.
If you don't need the flexibility that being able to hire and or fire a hundred thousand workers gives you then you might as well mechanise the plant anyway. As Foxconn itself is starting to do even with its production lines in China.
Mass employment in mass manufacturing in the rich countries is simply over, an economic and even a social structure that is passing into the mists of history. Complaining about it, trying to bring it back, just isn't going to work. It'll all either be done by more flexible workforces elsewhere or it will be done by robots. Humans on the assembly line in rich countries are becoming as archaic as muleskinners were after the invention of the tractor and the truck. You'll note that the people still hand guiding animals through ploughing and other farm work are the peasants in the poor world: it, like that assembly line work is becoming, is simply something that we people in the rich world no longer do.
