Nathan the prophet came to David. “There were two men in a certain town, one rich and the other poor. The rich man had a very large number of sheep and cattle, but the poor man had nothing except one little ewe lamb….It drank from his cup and was like a daughter to him. Now a traveler came to the rich man, but the rich man refrained from taking one of his own sheep…he took the ewe lamb that belonged to the poor man and prepared it…. David burned with anger… and said to Nathan, “the man who did this must die!” Nathan said “You are the man.”
So it is also with the great Achilles—Silicon Valley’s fabulously successful tech corporations—that are increasingly exposed for their vulnerable heel—the export of hundreds of thousands of jobs overseas, and the often terrible working condition in their supply chain plants.
The Second Samuel story of King David’s adultery with Bathsheba is to illustrate the moral magnitude of what can be called the scandal of Silicon Valley’s export of jobs. If some of these jobs are returned to the U.S. they would play a big role in bringing the Bay area and other U. S. communities out of their recession--and maybe they still can.
President Obama called for this kind of change in his State of the Union message, but it will require orders of magnitude in presidential leadership this President has so far not shown. It will mean simulating or creating a jobs and factory relocation “Czar” endowed with miracle-working powers to impel tech corporations such as Apple to create scaled-up manufacturing systems in U. S. communities. Here in the U. S. such plants could manufacture and assemble products like I-Pads and the I-Phone4’s.
Silicon Valley tech leaders are not motivated intuitively or ideologically by their own experience to want to develop domestic working class factories for their products. They are mesmerized and motivated to invent the next stupendously intricate nano device that will make billions in dollars roll down like a mighty stream. Ideologically they are simply loyal to their own experience shaped in the tech booms of the last 20 years. They argue that the billions of dollars they generate create job growth.
Yet in moral terms one greater task is asked of this Achilles—to bring the jobs back to the U.S. This is no idle matter. While the quiet, soft days of January’s economic improvements have shown a few flowerings, unless jobs reappear on a grand scale in both the US and Europe the glowering crisis of the global economy threatens a global second recession and the dystopian collapse predicted at the Davos Forum this week (see blog dated blank).
It’s not too much to say that the President’s freshly announced discourse with the corporate masters of private corporations may be the last chance for a stable and democratically structured U. S. economy and maybe the last chance for democratization in the global community.
The President needs a fast learning curve and a re-framing of his own mediator thought style to work this miracle. His intuitions, often wonderful, have outstripped his experience with the history of industrial relations in the U. S. For the first years of his Presidency he has mostly ignored the urging of social and economic experts to quickly re-launch the WPA and similar public works projects. Barney Franks is probably right with his weekend remark in the NY Times magazine that some of his friends on the Left “read into [Obama] more than was actually there.”
Last Spring an OpEd about “Steve Jobs’ Doughnut Hole” was sent by this writer to the NY Times, the San Jose Mercury News, the Silicon Valley Leadership Council and the South Bay AFL-CIO Labor Council. The analogy was to the empty middle of Jobs’ plan for a Pentagon-size circular headquarters. The essay grew from personal familiarity as a clergyman in cities like Cleveland, Youngstown and Pittsburgh where a quarter century and more ago the interfaith community had worked to oppose the destruction of their local workforces through corporate disinvestment; a disinvestment that in a few year’s time reduced the huge mid-west steel mills and metal-working factories to rust, ruining the lives of millions of skilled workers. It was all done in the name of a supposed natural economic law; a god that required the sacrifice of entire manufacturing cities and their workforces.
My essay was ignored but new alarm bells have begun ringing in recent weeks. Reuters and CNN carried stories of the consequences of current jobs exports. Jon Stewart did an extended interview about the question, and then beginning Sunday last two big, big stories have twice begun on the N Y Times’ front page with two columns above the fold and continued over four full pages with twenty columns in its main news sections.
The Times documents (at last) both the happy and grim sides of the Apple journey. While Apple does employ 43,000 within the U. S. and has drawn everyone’s admiration as it revolutionized a global universe of information and communication in dazzling ways, it also has contracted 200,000 jobs offshore. Through companies such as Foxconn—owned in Taiwan, with giant plants in China, Germany and many other countries—Apple products invented here in the U. S. are manufactured over there. Working conditions in these plants are well-documented as often both terrible and frequently the cause of high numbers of suicides and deaths from industrial explosions. Workers often work 60 to 72 hour shifts in hazardous and unhealthy conditions, it seems plain that what really drives this is our own hunger for glittering devices and the breakneck production whose costs are constantly under downward pressure to the last penny.
Many media sources report that Silicon Valley tech giants (e.g., Dell, H-P, Sony) have together contracted more than 1.2 million manufacture and assembly jobs away from the U. S. where unemployment as of the last count by Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) in December now numbers about 13 million. The number is much larger because the millions of workers trapped in long term unemployment are not counted and number additional millions.
Lost along with these jobs is what experts call “the multiplier effect” – for every tech industry job there are additional jobs required in parts design and manufacture, marketing, sales and transportation. Just as dazzling as its devices and software, is the extraordinary chain of assembly and supply that include myriad networks of parts suppliers, engineering and manufacture.
Understandably, the growing complaint that Silicon Valley has betrayed its own country is as welcome as Bubonic Plague, But other kinds of virtuosity are now required of this industry.
If just twenty percent of those exported jobs, say 200,000, were brought back to the U. S. the economies of half a dozen cities stricken with long term unemployment—like Atlanta, Detroit, Cleveland, Los Angeles, San Jose, Chicago and Youngstown—could be revived or given a huge lift.
There is always some moral ambiguity in these pictures. Shifting steelmaking to Korea and Brazil in the 1970s and 80s helped raise the local standard of living. The growing global economy has lifted millions of Chinese out of rural poverty, opened up a maze of educational opportunities, and created the largest migration of peasants in history as they moved from meager farms to higher levels of skill, pay and opportunity in China’s burgeoning new cities. This is to be celebrated in the name of our common humanity. But if its consequence destroys cities like Detroit and Cleveland or creates a hole in Silicon Valley where eighty-five thousand unemployed people languish, then it’s not too soon to ask some questions and challenge prevailing practices that keep sacrificing American workers to expedient corporate strategies.
The extent of the Times’ coverage is a measure of how urgent returning jobs to the U. S. has become. Late, very late, in its awakening the media and the President appear to now realize that this issue may become the whole ball game. What has been an unbelievable bonanza for profits now requires the Achilles-like tech industry to turn on a dime and address not the next profitable opportunity but a looming disaster born of the too easy global option to off-shore nearly everything.
On the defensive, an Apple executive quoted in the Times claimed “We sell iPhones in over a hundred countries. We don’t have an obligation to solve America’s problems.” The late Steve Jobs bluntly told President Obama at a Silicon dinner a year ago: “Those jobs are not coming back.” The Times’ weekend piece came close to prophesying that moving jobs back may be impossible. It cites many sources that say the size, flexibility and lifestyles of young Chinese workers could not be matched in the U.S. Also missing here in the U. S. workforce are the new engineering skills found in the young Chinese workforce. A former Apple executive asked “what U. S. plant can find 3,000 people overnight and convince them to live in dorms?—referring to Foxconn City where 230,000 employees in Shenzhen live and work.
Here are two answers from this blog corner: in the depression of the 1930’s young American workers did live in dorms built by the government and through the Civilian Conservation Corps built much of the state and national parks system. The people jobs exporters claim are not available are actually right here in our own regions. In Ohio there are 469,000 people unemployed. 174,000 in Georgia. Over 2 million in California. In Michigan 431,000. [BLS December 2011]. And there is a big community college system in place where engineers can be trained. In a column this week, David Brooks called for linking policy strategies, creating relevant training and streamlining regulations.
The hard driving Silicon Valley executives do work hard and often achieve much. But they have public responsibilities regardless of their private preoccupations and occupations. What we must teach them is to re-tool themselves with a social justice vision dedicated to overcoming growing inequality as a new priority framework for their lives. They’re often sitting out there in the Pews Friday mornings, evenings, and on Sunday mornings. It’s too easy for them to leave and continue talking only with themselves. Community clergy, civic and labor leaders need to insist on a conversation, and more than one.
Conversation can help everyone become more thoughtful. At the famous tech moguls dinner with President Obama last February, Steve Jobs, whom everyone knew was in failing health, finally conceded: It might be possible, someday, to locate some of Apple’s skilled manufacturing in the United States if the government helped train more American engineers.
The whole ball game is at stake in having serious community conversation—masters of the universe and the rank and file citizens together. It is not enough to hold open meetings while keeping real conversation private.
Aeschylus’ wrote a play about Prometheus, bound to a rock by Zeus as punishment for having given fire to the world. Tech leaders in Silicon Valley are virtually consumed in this fire, its demanding engineering requirements, its almost unimaginable entrepreneurial opportunities. The next spark, however carries the danger that it so disarranges our democratic worlds that all is lost just as Zeus and better known Gods feared.
