John Ogozalek, a teacher in upstate New York, watched Charlie Rose interview Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple. When asked why China moved its production to low-wage China, Cook blamed the schools. This is the same Apple that has been abused of multiple labor abuses in its Chinese factories. This is the same Apple whose factories are surrounded by safety nets to stop employee suicides. Low American skills or low Chinese wages? Low American skills or a country that doesn’t regulate safety in the workplace?
John O. writes:
So, here’s the corporate playbook: when asked about greed, find someone else to blame. And, hey, why not stick it to the public schools in the U.S.
“It’s skill,’ Apple CEO Tim Cook said in response to a question on “60 Minutes” Sunday from Charlie Rose as to why the company’s products are made in China.
Rose clearly wasn’t buying it. ‘They have more skills than American workers? They have more skills than German workers?’ he pressed.
‘The U.S., over time, began to stop having as many vocational kind of skills,’ Cook explained .’I mean, you can take every tool and die maker in the United States and probably put them in a room that we’re currently sitting in. In China, you would have to have multiple football fields.’
Earlier in the interview, the conversation heated up just a bit when the subject turned to allegations that Apple AAPL, +1.23% is a “tax avoider” and is “engaged in a sophisticated scheme” to shelter the $74 billion in revenue parked overseas,” according to the article on Marketwatch.com http://www.marketwatch.com/story/tim-cook-apple-doesnt-make-its-products-in-china-because-its-cheaper-2015-12-20
Of course, the irony of Cook’s comment is priceless. For years now the oligarchs in our country have been pummeling our schools, forcing classrooms to become test prep factories. And, now here’s a CEO saying we’ve let vocational ed fall by the wayside. So now we don’t have enough people to work in real factories?
It’s just become the fall-back position in this country. When in doubt, when caught off guard, if you’ve run out excuses, bash the teachers.
Maybe Cook is drinking from the same strange brew that Marco Rubio has been sipping. That false dichotomy…..Rubio’s “welders vs. philosophers” idea.
Tim Cook… you can do better.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Tim Cook you are an asshole. Personification of corporate greed and lack of concern for those less fortunate. Apple is the tax dodger in chief and labor exploiter extraordinaire. When did innovation become opposed to equality and fair play. When did our best and brightest become status quo and conservative. On the basis of this interview alone, I dislike Cook, Steve Jobs wife and all they stand for. Robber barons of 21st century.
Steve Jobs’ wife, Laurene Powell Jobs, is funding TFA and many other corporate reform organizations. She too buys the myth that the problem with America is public schools and teachers. She wants to reinvent the high school. Who asked her?
While I can relate to the sentiment, I’d really appreciate it if I could read a blog free of curse words.
Tim Cook, you are an apple core. 🙂
My husband is a tool and die maker. He was taught those skills on the job by a journeyman tool maker. Unions took the responsibility too of apprenticship programs which taught positions in skilled labor. These vocations are not the responsibility of K-12 education. I watched 60 minutes , those workers in China are not tool and die makers the were assembly line workers and nothing more. I felt sick after watching it, we are so far off the rails and I feel like we have no voice anymore. I am truly frightened for the future of this country. Thank you Diane for this blog and to all the regular contributors you give me hope.
Near the end of ‘THE BIG SHORT’, the voiceover narrator says the same thing about blaming teachers for the 2008 economic collapse. “They blamed the immigrants… and the … they even blamed public school teachers.” The narrator was saying this in the context of how no one was prosecuted in the aftermath… well almost no one … a stockbroker of Arab descent who was no worse than the rest was prosecuted, so instead they needed scapegoats.
Personally, I think the real story behind 2008 has yet to be written.
With all their gazillions, you’d think that Apple would be able to find someone with better lying skills.
Maybe they should post an ad for CEO in China.
HiJack Cereal
Foxconn slaves while Tim Cook plays
And Apple Jacks our lives away.
iPads do less good than harm
With talking fruit in me Lucky Charms.
Forced rhymes and irony Sent from my iPhone.
That 60 minutes segment was one long commercial for Apple. Tim Cook is an oligarch and economic royalist, a modern day robber baron. Rose is a suck up to these blood sucker billionaires.
CBS is nothing but corporate spin. Network content changed, a while back, when a guy from Fox took over.
On a CBS Morning show segment, a few months ago, Charlie Rose and his co-hosts played a charter school promo video, presented as news. The children of color in the video, chanted words, in unison, as if they were prisoners. The Rose crew, with all of the compassion and understanding of turnips, registered no thought or emotion about the scene they saw.
Hello the lack of vocational ed comment, does not blame teachers in any way.
It blames the powers that be that give TFA, Common Core, and the educational equivalent of Robert McNamara’s Body Counts – test everything, measure everything until they scream and of course never give treatment with increased funding.
The most successful CEO on the planet just popped this balloon, if we frame it this way.
Happy Holidays
It reminds me of finance people in the 1990’s. They were the masters of the universe then and we were all told government and individuals needed to conform to their norms and needs.
Public schools were the designated punching bag then, too.
I wonder why CEO’s and politicians don’t want to talk about wage stagnation and income inequality and keep returning to blaming public schools? Is it because they aren’t actually willing to do anything about wage stagnation and income inequality because that would involve political risk for politicians and a financial hit for CEO’s?
It’s particularly galling because public schools are a huge and growing market for tech product, helped along by eager marketing by federal and state government. One would think the people who are hoping to profit on public schools wouldn’t spend a good part of every day blaming them for everything and anything.
Maybe we should get smarter with where we invest our public school budgets. Make them work to earn our business, instead of this ridiculous worshipful posture where they’re doing us some kind of favor by allowing us to buy their products. That’s a free market mechanism I can get behind. Public schools are a giant market. Let’s demand more from prospective contractors.
There may be more to this than is quoted, but this is only blaming schools if you take it for granted that it is the responsibility of schools to teach vocational skills. The reason we used to have tool and die makers and don’t now is not so much because we used to teach that in school or trade school, but because we had lots of factories and people learned on the job. If you move all the factories offshore, after 30 years, you don’t have the expertise here to start world class factories, even if you want to.
Cook knows this, and to be fair, it is just as reasonable an interpretation of his statement as saying he’s blaming the schools (unless he explicitly blames schools in an unquoted part of the interview).
At the same time, U.S. industry bemoaned the lack of engineers… working engineers had to leave the field, for marketing or finance, to get promotions.
At the same time, Chambers of Commerce bemoaned the lack of skilled workers, they sought every tax abatement and loophole possible. Corporate welfare doesn’t create a collective infrastructure for prosperity.
At the same time, Silicon Valley blamed scapegoats, for a lack of “on demand” workers, the major tech corporations got charged with collusion, in keeping software engineer pay, low.
At the same time, the tech giants complained about shortages in skilled workers, they skirted the system to bring in lower paid foreign workers on visas. They’re not job creators nor builders, they are users and takers.
Funny. I had a completely different response. I thought “Finally someone called out the failure of NCLB and other programs.”
CCSS, NCLB, and now ESSA are all based on ivory tower driven education – if we could only make everyone a computer engineer society would be better. Cook calls out that ivory tower failure – the failure to help kids become people who know how to make things.
How genuine is his response? Can’t say. But I think we should trumpet what he said loudly and use it to attack the ivory tower theories of CCSS and the testing regimes.
US universities graduate plenty of people with degrees in computer engineering and other engineering fields. There is not shortage of such people in the US, but the tech companies say there is so that they can support importing people on visa programs who will work for far less pay. It is all about low wages.
http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/03/the-myth-of-the-science-and-engineering-shortage/284359/
Agreed. Guess that’s why I think we should run with Cook’s comments. Based on what he said, our obsession with computer grads is clearly silly. Yet the entire education establishment has structured itself with a nearly single minded goal of driving more tech grads. Silly.
Agreed. A very lonely and limited focus on very narrow approaches to math and ELA have left most student behind. Failure to provide multiple pathways (including vocational) for success spotlights the largest failure of NCLB and its bastard son, RTTT/CCSS.
An excellent related read from Alfie Kohn:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alfie-kohn/what-no-child-left-behind_b_8832408.html
I very much doubt that Apple isn’t on the STEM bandwagon. Cook is playing the blame game. He is not blaming his own industry for moving manufacturing overseas. I still have an image in my head of a former manufacturing supervisor in a chip factory (Intel?) who was living in a tent probably within spitting distance of the execs who moved manufacturing overseas.
Not at all to deny that being true. But I still think he has dealt us some pure gold – to fight the ivory tower standards and testing movement.
To win this battle we have to be able to use things said by unusual people – like Cook. So go match this comment with what Matthew Crawford discusses in “Shop Class as Soul Craft” and we have a useful set of ideas…
You are right. I’m guessing that he really doesn’t realize the implications of what he said. Tobe able to use his own words against him has the potential of being very powerful.
Not really sure what to guess about what he thinks. I found this article. And there are some useful thoughts in it. But also a bit of the tech ed hype. http://mashable.com/2015/12/09/tim-cook-hour-of-code/#mqG8XUB2o8qA
I would guess that he is really very ignorant about what a good elementary school classroom looks like. I am highly insulted that he is using the test based classroom as a standard that traditional schools embraced. I also am very suspicious of someone who talks about the “traditional” lecture style classroom. I don’t see any depth in such an analysis. It is really a plug for Apple.
You know, I keep hearing from the President and his donors that there is a “skills gap” in tech but the people who work in the field tell a different story. They say there’s a drive to lower wages in tech- increase supply to excess levels in order to drive down wages.
Maybe someone in DC or elite commentary could address this divide between “real life” and what we’re told by top level politicians and CEO’s.
Let’s bring some actual welders and programmers and electricians into this “skills gap” discussion, because they tell me something different. They tell me this is about cheaper labor. That’s okay- a lot of CEO’s want cheaper labor- but maybe they could see their way to telling the truth occasionally instead of scolding working and middle class people.
What exactly are the skills requisite for working on an assembly line with a tiny soldering iron for 14 hours a day?! What a joke.
I have a crazy idea that used to be common practice- companies could pay to train employees. Outlandish, I know, that we should demand they contribute to training for the employees they need.
Why is it entirely up to the public or the employee to cover the cost of training people to write code or weld or wire a circuit? Aren’t they just shifting costs from their companies to the public and individual workers? I know we’re supposed to grovel at their feet and meet all their demands but maybe a public advocate could gather their courage and suggest this- it worked pretty well from 1940 to 1980. I went to public school in the 1970’s and 1980’s and I guarantee we weren’t any smarter or better trained than my 7th grader, although apparently a huge group of adults like to think we were.
We’re on the same page, Chiara. Shifting training costs to the public. Read the ridiculous job ads that are published these days. Add to the training ploy the destruction of unions and collective bargaining. Looking at the working conditions in overseas factories tells the true story: companies are looking for slave labor.
That’s it Chiara! Companies used to train the new hires for the specific skills that the company needed them for. Even as a software engineer with a Masters degree in Computer Science, I was given weeks of good training by my large computer company when I started working there.
But over time, companies have tried to shift that responsibility to the schools, and when the schools can’t teach the specific skills needed by those companies, the companies blame the schools. So then the companies have a reason to shift their operations overseas.
My wife heard this speaker at a software technical communication convention once. The speaker was a professional trainer. He talked about talking to the CEO of a company about training their employees. The CEO was concerned that, if the trainer trained the employees, that the employees would leave and go work somewhere else for more money. The trainer said, what if I don’t train them, and they stay?
Apple is a corporate thief. it takes its profits and refuses to give a fair share to our economy, hiding it offshore.
The first sentence from this article in Bloomberg News:
“The U.S. and China differ in many ways. But when it comes to education, there’s one striking similarity. In both countries a mismatch exists between what young people learn and the skills employers need.”
http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2014-06-24/china-wants-more-vocational-students-fewer-universities
You don’t need vocational skills to do repetitive electronic assembly work! The majority of the workers in the Chinese Apple factory were involved in this low-skill assembly work, not tool and die makers. Tim Cook is full of it!
And in the process of telling this outright lie to millions of low information Americans, he feels the need to throw teachers and the public schools under his driver-less bus.
Apple wants “toil and die” — not “tool and die” — workers.
And that’s precisely why they moved their operations to China.
Nothing but AMERICAN GREED is driving the public education boat aground. When educators talked about the obsession to ram EVERY STUDENT into colleges, no matter the students’ interest or abilities. Many employment preparation options were erased for millions of children who wanted to become chefs, tool & dye makers, mechanics, cosmotologists, sign painters, child care worker …list is endless. High schools no longer offered General Ed Diplomas, only college prep & attendance certificates for SpEd.
I taught students who were no longer offered skills helpful to their lives, only college prep. Admins accused teachers of aiming too low and limiting those students. Many of these students had IQs below 70, and needed a curriculum specific to their needs. No longer available.
All this orchestration is to feed American Greed and the he** with education and children.
Highly disturbing and insane.
Tim Cook joins the long list of greedy, corporate liars. The reason Apple’s manufacturing is in China is not because of a ‘skills gap,’ it is because people work for slave wages for twelve hours at a time. The work is so tedious and dismal they installed nets under the dormitory windows to catch potential suicide victims. By the way some companies seeking greener pastures of exploitative labor are eyeing Vietnam as the new ‘China.’ The slave wages are even lower there.
Did you notice when he claimed that the employees there don’t work more than 60 hours a week?
I think I found where some of the missing wage increases are going:
“Very Merry Christmas for CEOs—Their compensation is 303X that of typical worker, up from 58X in 1990”
1990. Not 1950.
And no end in sight. Obviously that’s not the only explanation for stagnant wages, but It seems silly to ignore where the money is actually going and pretend we can’t find any of it. Presumably they could push some back down, since they sent it up.
What caused the decline of vocational training in our public schools?
Maybe the answer is in this piece:
At the same time, the standards and accountability movement was taking hold in public education. States had begun to write academic standards, or goals, for what students should learn. In 2001, Congress passed the No Child Left Behind Act. That law required states, in exchange for federal education funding, to test their students every year and to insure that all students would eventually be proficient in math and reading.
All students meant the kids in vocational programs too. And once states starting testing their students, it became clear that many students in vocational programs were at the bottom in terms of math and reading skills. Under No Child Left Behind, those programs could eventually be shut down for poor performance. If they were going to survive, vocational schools had to up their game in terms of academics.
http://www.americanradioworks.org/segments/the-troubled-history-of-vocational-education/
But most, if not all, of the countries that take the PISA test that the United States is compared to, have public vocational schools that offer students three choices as they enter high school:
1. vocational training that leads to a job out of high school
2. academic training for those who want to go to college
3. both vocational and college prep
I even wrote a number of post about this and did a lot of digging for the facts.
http://crazynormaltheclassroomexpose.com/2014/01/28/the-us-versus-the-world-facts-that-reveal-the-truth-about-the-international-pisa-tests/
The graduation rates of 17/18 year olds of the top ten countries compared for academics not vocational programs:
http://crazynormaltheclassroomexpose.com/2012/09/03/not-broken-part-35/
Almost half the students in China drop out of school at age 12 or enter vocational training, while the other half go on to the junior secondary education system, which educates ages 12 to 15 where only 66.8 million were enrolled in 2002, which means 55.2 million students left the education system at the end of the primary system.
http://crazynormaltheclassroomexpose.com/2011/08/03/civil-disobedience-and-no-child-left-behind-part-4/
Not to get sucked into this, but I think everyone is missing the point here. Cook isn’t necessarily saying we don’t have engineers, or enough STEM education, or whatever. He refers to the lack of tool and die makers — and he’s doesn’t want trainees and apprentices. In 2015, the people with experience in setting up a state of the art electronics factory — creating and maintaining the factory, not working in it — those people are in China, not in the US. They aren’t here because we haven’t been building factories in the US at any scale for heck, fifty years or more.
The mistake was letting this go in the first place, and now that it is gone, getting it back is going to be… well, probably impossible.
Tom Hoffman, the export of factories and work was done to cut costs. It started with northern factories moving South, to find low wages and no unions. Then the jobs moved to Mexico, same reason. Then, with NAFTA, more moved South. Then employers discovered that Asian workers were cheaper still. The greatest fault of American workers was expecting a middle-class wage.
You’re absolutely right, Diane. I’m just saying that Cook is right insofar as 50 years later, we don’t have a large pool of world class tool and die makers of the type Apple needs. When manufacturing moves, there is a long process of scaling up to the highest skill processes. The easiest to move are the simple processes, then finally the local experience builds up to the point that the most sophisticated manufacturing can be undertaken. For Apple to move back onshore, they’d be looking at a long term commitment to move that process in reverse.
Coincidentally, I’m working on an interview/oral history with a senior labor leader here in Rhode Island. He’s an 8th grade dropout. Here’s how it worked back in the day:
“In those days every big textile company generally had a good maintenance workforce. This particular plant had an entire machine shop, because in those days a lot of the equipment was made right there. They had this big maintenance shop, and this fellow, the head of the maintenance department, bought the building off of Berkshire Hathaway and opened up a millwright operation. I had been what they called a section hand. I took care of the spooling and did minor maintenance work, keeping the machines running, fixing them when they broke down…
He said to me, “Paul, I’m opening up a machine shop, would you like to go to work for me?” And I said, “George, yeah, I need a job anyway, but I don’t know anything.” “No, no,” he says, “I can teach you a lot and I’d like to have you, I like you.” He’d come through the plant fixing things, and we’d talk. So I went to work for him.
And out of that I became a machinist, and a welder, and a plumber and pipefitter. I did it all. He taught me all of that.”
People learn how to build and run factories by building and running factories. Close all the factories, nobody knows how anymore. Then you have a “skills gap.”
Please understand, I am in no way agreeing with Mr. Cook, however….if he’s complaining that there are no skilled workers anymore, no “blue collar” if you will, its HIS/SOCIETY’S fault. Pushing the schools to chase after standardized test scores, scaring the public into believing that everyone MUST have a college degree, looking down on those who choose a trade school rather than a university….that’s not the teacher’s fault. It’s not public education’s fault. We have legislated ourselves into an education nightmare. Or maybe I should say, a skills nightmare.
Tim Cook never heard of Rosie the Riveter? US companies trained people to do countless jobs in the munitions industry during World War II. Their CEOs often didn’t have the industrial engineer or Duke MBA degrees that Cook holds but they did believe as the Rosie poster declared, “We Can Do It.”
Tim Cook you are the “bad apple” that should be on Time’s cover, not the teachers.
The net outside of the Chinese worker dormitory to prevent suicide, said everything we need to know about the kind of man Cook is. His talk is as cheap as any robber baron’s.
How often is Cook’s work or leisure interrupted by thoughts of the plight of workers? My guess- only when someone directly asks him about it.
SICK!