[F1grandprix]

Not long ago, Apple boasted that its products were made in America. Today, few are. Almost all of the 70 million iPhones, 30 million iPads
and 59 million other products Apple sold last year were manufactured overseas. Apple has become one of the best-known, most admired
and most imitated companies on earth, in part through an unrelenting mastery of global operations. Last year, it earned over $400,000
in profit per employee, more than Goldman Sachs, Exxon Mobil or Google.

However, what has vexed economists and policy makers is that Apple — and many of its high-technology peers — are not nearly as avid in
creating American jobs as other famous companies were in their heydays. Apple employs 43,000 people in the United States and 20,000
overseas, a small fraction of the over 400,000 American workers at General Motors in the 1950s, or the hundreds of thousands at General
Electric in the 1980s. Many more people work for Apple’s contractors: an additional 700,000 people engineer, build and assemble iPads, iPhones
and Apple’s other products. But almost none of them work in the United States. Instead, they work for foreign companies in Asia, Europe and
elsewhere, at factories that almost all electronics designers rely upon to build their wares.

But while Apple is far from alone, it offers a window into why the success of some prominent companies has not translated into large numbers
of domestic jobs. What’s more, the company’s decisions pose broader questions about what corporate America owes Americans as the global
and national economies are increasingly intertwined.

Follow the discussion through this feature video by New York Times ... the iPhone Economy!

http://sammyboy.com/showthread.php?1...24#post1065524

A look at the largest employers shows how America’s economy has changed. Over the last 50 years, the country has shifted from creating goods
to providing services. Today, about a tenth of Americans work in manufacturing, while service providers and retailers like Walmart and temp firms
like Kelly Services employ about six in seven of the nation’s workers.