Tim Cook Is Not a Hypocrite

By Michael Brendan Dougherty

Wednesday, May 12, 2021

 

Steve Jobs had always wanted to make Apple computers in America and even across the First World. He tried to build a manufacturing plant for Apple in Silicon Valley itself. Then he tried again with NeXT computers. Jobs was fascinated with Henry Ford and with the ascendant Japanese manufacturing process. But these efforts were failures, and when he returned to Apple in 1997, Jobs brought on Tim Cook, a supply-chains expert who mastered the ability to outsource and subcontract the manufacturing process, taking full advantage of “both low-cost labor and lax environmental regulations,” according to the New York Times.

 

It’s just too costly to manufacture in America! The only manufacturing that Apple now runs directly is a made-to-order iMac assembly plant in Cork, Ireland — a country that is now the largest tax shelter in the world, partly because Apple rinses all its European profits through it. The rest has been outsourced to working environments that can operate without the bother of human rights and democracy. Apple’s executives talk about how outsourcing moved the industry of manufacturing that went into computers. From Texas to Japan, then to Korea, then to Taiwan, and finally to mainland China. But it turns out, besides the environmental and tax-dodging implications, there is a moral cost to this outsourcing.

 

These moral costs have been coming in for years. Workers at Apple contractor Foxconn once threatened mass suicide unless conditions improved. Foxconn’s response was to surround the building in anti-suicide nets.

 

But now, the moral costs include direct participation in genocide. According to a blockbuster report in The Information, seven Apple contractors have used forced labor of Uyghur Muslims, who are the victims of China’s push to make its western region more like the Han-dominated east. Uyghur Muslims are subject to North Korea–like surveillance, German-style train-car rides from prison camp to prison camp, and now to forced labor in China’s booming tech-manufacturing center. Apple gave itself a clean bill of moral health last year, certifying it didn’t rely on human slavery. Meanwhile, its lobbyists tried to weaken a bill in Congress, the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act.

 

Now, the normal response of conservatives would be to accuse Apple of hypocrisy, contrasting the company’s woke humanitarian corporate branding with the reality of its manufacturing. This became something of a sport when a few years ago Apple fired Denise Young Smith — a black woman — who was the company’s vice president of diversity and inclusion. She had offended people by saying that “twelve white, blue-eyed, blond men in a room” could be diverse.

 

I find it remarkably consistent. When the then-governor of Indiana signed a religious-freedom bill that would protect the right of Americans to legally practice their religion in his state, Tim Cook opposed it forthrightly. The Apple CEO said it was “very dangerous” and “bad for business.” He reiterated that “Apple is open. Open to everyone, regardless of where they come from.”

 

That Tim Cook remains silent on the suppression of Islam in the company’s major manufacturing center is entirely consistent with his approach to Indiana. He wants the same profits-first secularism in America. Legal protections for religion would just get in the way. And clearly, given its lobbying activities, Apple is open to everyone. Tim Cook doesn’t want Apple to discriminate against you just because you came from Kashgar in manacles with your hair and beard shaved off, or your reproductive organs sterilized. You too are welcome to assemble a high-priced, planned-obsolescent consumer product in an environment with no real safety regulations! That’s real diversity!

 

American companies used to be the pride of the country. They were the arsenal of democracy during World War II. Throughout the Cold War, IBM remained careful not to, you know, help the Russian Communists crush Hungary in 1956. And it was assumed then that America’s major companies would try, wherever possible, to leave politics to the public. But then we got it into our heads that we could have free trade with slave nations.

 

It’s perfectly understandable that after Bill Clinton essentially licensed an economic model of capital-rich America reinvesting in labor-rich China, executives such as Tim Cook would make their reputations doing just that. What’s less understandable is why we admire them for doing it. Or ignore the moral and geopolitical costs of doing it. Or credit their progressivism.

 

No tech publication has the juice to make Apple answer about its cooperation with human slavery. Not if they continue to want to get scoops, early-review models, and interviews with Apple’s chief executives.

 

And that, too, is a function of Chinese soft power. The only institution with the power to do it is Congress. If it could ever bother to do anything at all.