Let’s Make iPods in America, Says Made in the USA Foundation

The Made in the USA Foundation is calling on Apple for a new year’s resolution: move Mac and iPod manufacturing back to the United States.

The foundation blames the late co-founder Steve Jobs for outsourcing Apple.

“It's all about Jobs. Steve Jobs. Although he was brilliant, creative and a successful CEO, he had one flaw: he outsourced Apple,” reads a report from The Made in the USA Foundation.

The organization believes “Mr. Jobs could have created a hundred thousand jobs in the United States, but instead he created them in China and Korea. Apple can still move many of those jobs back to the United States.”

Apple’s main reason behind this move was simple - increase profit margins. According to an estimate by Forbes, the Cupertino giant has one of the highest profit margins of any corporation: 41.4%.

But all this comes at the cost of Asian workers, says the Foundation.

“Apple's iPods are made by mainly female workers who earn as little as $40 per month,” says the report citing a piece by Britain's Daily Mail. Workers generally must pay for their accommodation and food, "which takes up half their salaries" according to the same British report.

Joel D. Joseph, Chairman of Made in the USA Foundation, recalls that Apple once used to manufacture computers in The States.

Among those computers were, of course, the Apple I which Wozniak and Jobs created in their legendary garage-headquarters, the Apple II and the original Macintosh.

“With Steve Jobs untimely passing, perhaps it is time for Apple to bring some of these jobs back to the United States,” according to the foundation. “Steve Jobs represents the one percent at the top of the pyramid that the 99 percenters are protesting on Wall Street.”

“Maybe the protesters will turn their anger on Apple, and other companies like Nike, who charge premium prices for products made in sweat shops by virtual slave labor. It is the millions of jobs that have been outsourced by Apple and other American companies that has weakened the U.S. labor market and is making the new generation of Americans the first generation to be poorer than their parents,” the foundation concludes.