Last February, at a dinner for Silicone Valley luminaries, President Obama asked Steve Jobs what it would take for iPhones to be made in the USA. Jobs essentially told the president that was never going to happen.

Charles Duhigg and Keith Bradsher of the New York Times set out to explain why not. They interviewed “more than three dozen current and former Apple employees and contractors” as well as “economists, manufacturing experts, international trade specialists, technology analysts, academic researchers, employees at Apple’s suppliers, competitors and corporate partners, and government officials.”:

“Apple’s an example of why it’s so hard to create middle-class jobs in the U.S. now,” said Jared Bernstein, who until last year was an economic adviser to the White House.

“If it’s the pinnacle of capitalism, we should be worried.”

Apple executives say that going overseas, at this point, is their only option. One former executive described how the company relied upon a Chinese factory to revamp iPhone manufacturing just weeks before the device was due on shelves. Apple had redesigned the iPhone’s screen at the last minute, forcing an assembly line overhaul. New screens began arriving at the plant near midnight.

A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day.

“The speed and flexibility is breathtaking,” the executive said. “There’s no American plant that can match that.”

Similar stories could be told about almost any electronics company — and outsourcing has also become common in hundreds of industries, including accounting, legal services, banking, auto manufacturing and pharmaceuticals.

Experts say cheap labor is only part of the reason Apple assembles iPhones in Asia. Even more appealing to Apple is the fact that the supply chains that sustain an iPhone factory are also based on Asia. In other words, if you want to make iPhones, it’s cheaper to be near the factories that make the iPhone screws, the iPhone gaskets, and so on. China has most of those subcomponent factories, and the infrastructure to get the screws to the iPhone factory on short notice. The U.S. doesn’t have that infrastructure anymore.

So, why are all these component factories in China? The three main reasons seem to be economies of scale, Chinese economic policy, and cheap, readily exploitable labor. Of course, Chinese labor is artificially cheap and “flexible” because the totalitarian government squelches workers’ attempts to organize.

The least convincing argument is the purported skill gap between Chinese and U.S. workers. “We shouldn’t be criticized for using Chinese workers,” a current Apple executive was quoted as saying. “The U.S. has stopped producing people with the skills we need.”

Duhigg and Bradsher make a convincing case that the U.S. isn’t training enough engineers. But does the skills argument work when it comes to lower-level assembly line employees at FoxConn, a company that is notorious for recruiting huge numbers of young workers from the countryside? Nobody is born knowing how to solder an iPhone component. FoxConn must provide on-the-job training to much of its workforce. Granted, the marginal cost of training additional workers is much smaller for a company that already has a workforce of 1 million.

After reading the story, it’s hard to muster much enthusiasm for retooling the U.S. economy to create jobs like those of iPhone-makers at FoxConn. The reporters focus on skilled workers, but the reality is that most of the work of making an iPhone has been broken down to its most menial elements and outsourced to low-paid, low-skill employees. This model is sustainable, for corporations if not for humans, because there is a huge pool of desperate workers who will happily take a FoxConn worker’s job. Relatively speaking, the U.S. has a population gap and a misery gap.

Maybe the solution for the U.S. is automation coupled with progressive taxation and income redistribution. Let the machines do the work while the people share more equally in the profits.

[Photo credit: JaredEarle, Creative Commons.]

Sidney-winner John Nichols of The Nation went on Democracy Now! yesterday to talk about the ongoing campaign to recall Republican Governor Scott Walker for stripping public employees of their collective bargaining rights. The pro-recall contingent needed 540,000 signatures, and they obtained over a million, making the campaign to unseat Walker the largest recall effort in U.S. history.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And John, most people don’t realize that those million signatures represent about almost a half of the electorate in Wisconsin. Could you—when you say the proportion that the signatures represent.

JOHN NICHOLS: Well—yes, they represent almost half of the electorate in the last election, in 2010, and what you might reasonably presume to be the electorate that would participate in a recall election. It’s not all the electorate. There—Wisconsin, up until very recently, didn’t require you to be registered to vote before you went to vote. So, you know, we don’t know. A recall election could actually pull in hundreds of thousands of additional voters. This is a very exciting and very charged thing. But what is important to remember is that the size of that proportion of the existing electorate has never been achieved before.

A state board must now review the signatures to ensure that they are valid. If the pro-recall faction has gathered enough signatures, Walker will face a new election, and possibly a primary challenge within his own party.

Walker didn’t campaign on an anti-collective bargaining platform, instead he foisted the controversial and unpopular law on the electorate as one of his first acts of office. The voters of Wisconsin may finally have their say on collective bargaining rights.

Nichols’ forthcoming book is entitled, Uprising: How Wisconsin Renewed the Politics of Protest, from Madison to Wall Street.

Democratic members of the Indiana State House caucused in the rotunda on Wednesday morning to demand a referendum on proposed “right to work” legislation that would cripple organized labor:

The Indiana House remained at a standstill this morning, with most Democrats refusing to come to the floor as they protest the controversial “right to work” bill and demand to offer an amendment seeking a public referendum on it.

Democrats met in the Statehouse Rotunda, with labor protesters surrounding them and more watching from the balconies above, cheering as Democrats promised to fight this issue.

As their chants of “Power to the People” rang in the Statehouse, Republicans attempted to come into session on the 3rd floor, but again did not have the necessary quorum of 67 legislators to do business. There are 60 Republicans, and this morning four Democrats joined them on the floor while the remainder of the Democrats were in the Rotunda.

The Democrats are staying off the State House floor to postpone a vote on the bill, which would otherwise pass the GOP-controlled body. The Dems say they can’t vote because they’re busy working on an amendment to hold a right-to-work referendum.

Proponents of the bill say that “right to work” legislation would create jobs by attracting manufacturers from non right-to-work states. However, as Prof. Gordon Lafer argues in The Nation, right-to-work legislation is an outdated tactic for attracting manufacturing jobs. These days, companies looking for cheap labor aren’t shopping between states, they’re taking their work overseas.

[Photo credit: The Indiana State House Rotunda, by Jim Bowen, Creative Commons.]

New York Times labor reporter Steven Greenhouse tweeted, “Jon Stewart is doing devastating takedown of FoxConn factory giant w/horrid conditons that produces for Apple & Microsoft.” Indeed, the Daily Show host pulls no punches.

Stewart satirizes the notion that the U.S. factories should emulate the Chinese electronics giant FoxConn, which employs 800,000 workers assembling everything from iPhones to Xboxes. FoxConn has found ingenious ways to save money. Workers live in the FoxConn compound, housed eight to a room in dormitories where roommates may not know each other’s names. They are paid 31 cents an hour, and work up to 35 hours per shift.

Workers who try to unionize will be imprioned. Stewart wonders if incarceration might be more pleasant than life on the FoxConn line.

After a spate of suicides, FoxConn installed nets to catch would-be jumpers.

“In Western medicine, we call that ‘treating the symptom,’” Stewart quips.