Apple's American job disaster

The death of Steve Jobs was followed by an avalanche of superlatives - brilliant, genius, and visionary among the more common. He was likened to Leonardo da Vinci, Albert Einstein, and Thomas Edison.

But in the case of Edison, there was one significant difference that went unmentioned. For more than a century, just one of Edison's inventions alone - the incandescent lightbulb - was manufactured at numerous locations in the United States, providing employment for millions of Americans across family generations.

The Apple home computer, not at all. After only one generation, all the Apple manufacturing jobs in America disappeared, as the work of building and assembling the machines was turned over to laborers in sweatshops in China and other countries. Jobs that should have provided employment for Americans for decades to come were terminated.

For Apple, the corporation, the system functioned beautifully. This year the company had more cash in its bank accounts than the U.S. Treasury. And for one day, Monday, Sept. 19, the company was the most valuable corporation on the planet, its stock worth $382 billion. It was a sum that exceeded even the worth of Exxon Mobil Corp., the world's largest international oil and gas company.

Needless to say, Apple proved a disaster for its onetime production workers. It turned out to be a classic bait-and-switch con for working folks. One day they held jobs that allowed them to do all the things people had come to expect from their employment. The next day the jobs were gone.

No one saw it coming. In fact, when new production plants came to Elk Grove, Calif., near Sacramento, and Fountain, Colo., near Colorado Springs, the future looked especially bright. Opened in 1992, the Elk Grove facility became the centerpiece of Sacramento's campaign to lure high-tech companies away from the Bay Area. Other computer-makers soon followed. By the mid-1990s, the Sacramento area was considered the computer-manufacturing capital of the United States. Apple's Elk Grove plant, which manufactured circuit boards and desktop computers, operated seven days a week and employed 1,500 people.

About the same time, the Apple plant in Fountain went into production and soon became the company's largest manufacturing facility, turning out a million power-book and desktop computers a year. It was a state-of-the-art facility that helped the Colorado Springs area attract other high-tech companies.