 "How Apple empowers, and employs, the American working class")
During the presidential campaign, President-elect Donald J Trump complained that America had lost too many manufacturing jobs and promised to force big companies like Apple to bring that work home. “I’m going to get Apple to start making their computers and their iPhones on our land, not in China,” he said.
For a host of reasons, Apple is unlikely to produce iPhones in the United States. But opening a smartphone factory in this country is not the only way to provide solid employment for working-class Americans who lack college degrees.
Apple’s overall contribution to the American economy is significant. Beyond the 80,000 people it directly employs in the United States, it says 69 supplier facilities in 33 states manufacture parts that go into its products. Hundreds of thousands of software developers also write apps for iPhones and iPads.
Apple’s rapid growth here in central Texas, where it now employs about 6,000 people, up from 2,100 seven years ago, provides a window into the vast constellation of jobs at the world’s largest technology company and their economic impact. At Apple’s sparkling new complex in northwest Austin, workers who are spread throughout seven limestone-and-glass buildings field about 8,000 customer tech-support calls a day, manage the company’s vast network of suppliers and figure out how to move around millions of iPhones a week to ensure they get into the hands of customers when they want them.
Employees here help run Apple’s iTunes music and app stores, handle the billions of dollars going in and out of the company’s American operations and continuously update the Maps software that is integral to iPhones and iPads. At another Austin location, about 500 engineers work on the chips that will run the next round of Apple’s products.
Also Read
The Austin campus — the company’s largest outside its headquarters in Cupertino, California — offers plenty of perks, too. When employees are not working, they can lounge on chairs shaded from the Texas sun, dine at a two-story cafeteria that serves an abundance of food options, including barbecued ribs and banana-bread gelato, and visit a full-service medical clinic, which includes dentists, acupuncturists and a robot-assisted pharmacy.
Although contractors at the Austin technical support call centre earn as little as $14.50 an hour, equivalent to about $30,000 a year, many of them become permanent staff members, which means better pay, after the typical one-year contract is up. Experienced call centre employees earn around $45,000 a year, plus generous benefits and small annual stock grants. Pay is even higher for more senior advisers and managers. Apple says that, excluding benefits and stock compensation, the average salary of its Austin employees, including management, is $77,000 a year.
Apple declined to discuss its future expansion plans in Austin and in the United States.
“Apple has created over two million jobs in the United States since the introduction of the iPhone nine years ago, including explosive growth in iOS developers, thousands of new supplier and manufacturing partners, and a 400 per cent increase in our employee teams,” the company said in a statement. “We made the unique decision to keep and expand our contact centres for customers in the Americas in the United States, and Austin is home to many of those employees. We plan to continue to invest and grow across the US.”
Last week, a reporter and photographer visited the Austin campus and interviewed more than a dozen workers, from managers to a prep cook on the kitchen staff. Apple’s public relations staff monitored some of the conversations, but others were unsupervised.
©2016 The New York Times News Service
