Apple has made its first attempt to quantify how many American jobs can be credited to the sale of its iPads and other products, a group that includes the Apple engineers who design the devices and the drivers who deliver them even the people who build the trucks that get them there.
Study results
On Friday last, the company published the results of a study it commissioned saying that it had ‘created or supported' 514,000 U.S. jobs.
The study is an effort to show that Apple's benefit to the U.S. job market goes far beyond the 47,000 people it directly employs here. Apple, based in Cupertino, Calif., released the study on its website but declined to say why it published the results.
The company's employment practices have come under closer examination.
Apple and other high-tech companies, including Internet companies, create relatively few jobs compared with other stalwarts of U.S. business, like General Motors and General Electric in their heyday.
Apple has created more jobs overseas, about 700,000 through a network of suppliers that make iPhones, iPads and other products.
A number of companies, including Microsoft, have commissioned similar research aiming to tally up such indirect employment, by suppliers and other partners. The use of ‘job multipliers' has become common practice, sometimes put forth by businesses when they lobby for tax breaks from local and state governments.
But the calculations of such multipliers are often fiercely debated both in economic and political terms.
The Analysis Group, the consulting firm Apple hired, concluded that 257,000 jobs were in companies that work directly with Apple, including employees in Kentucky and New York at Corning Inc., a company that creates glass for the iPhone, and people at a Samsung plant in Texas that makes computer chips for its devices. — New York Times News Service
