DIRTY JOBS (SOMEBODY’S GOTTA DO IT)
Steve Jobs was responsible for some great things. The impact he had in personal computing, publishing, telecommunications, music, and animation was indeed significant and far-reaching. By all accounts Jobs was a tireless worker, a gifted strategist, and a passionate leader. But Jobs and the company he founded were more than that. After celebrating his numerous achievements – but, before erecting monuments in his honour and naming our children after him – we should also feel free to speak honestly about the unpleasant side of the company and the man that co-created and then resurrected it. After all, there are more than a few things Jobs did (and failed to do) that made him an irresponsible, unethical, and downright disturbing character.
For instance, while the internet began to boom, allowing people to express themselves more freely and easily than ever before, Jobs was fixated on suppression and control. Personally opposed to freedom of expression, Jobs insisted that the public get his sole, divine permission before creating for or putting anything on their own Apple device. In the name of protecting adults from one another and children from the evils of the world (and maintaining God-like control over people) Jobs unilaterally banned from his devices: gay travel guides, political cartoons and caricatures, Congressional candidate pamphlets, Vogue fashion spreads, anything created by another company and, well, countless other things he alone labelled as morally suspect. For perspective this would be like Toshiba or Sony telling you what you may view on your television or through your VCR or what things you may or may not record with your tape recorder or video camera. It’s inconceivable really.
As Jobs concerned himself with moralizing and controlling everyone else’s behaviour the man himself was busily engaged in corruption. The “Backdating scandal” saw the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission bring charges against Apple’s chief financial officer and an Apple general counsel. (“Backdating” essentially requires lying to investors, creating false documentation, and cheating the system for personal profits.) Apple was eventually found to have 6,428 instances of financial “irregularities” in just one four-year period. They were forced to restate their earnings and to pay $105 million for misrepresentation while the executives who were charged settled their lawsuits for $3.6 million and $2.2 million, respectively. Though Jobs was part of a separate derivative suit that settled for $14 million, he avoided litigation in the backdating scandal. This was the case despite Jobs acknowledging, in a February 2001 email to Apple’s CFO, that he’d personally okayed the backdating of Apple shares (which closed at $21.13) with their January price ($16.81) – a $4.32 adjustment that put $20 million into the bank accounts of Apple executives. Significantly, there were no instances of backdating found before Jobs took over as Apple’s CEO. Further, Disney, which bought Pixar from Jobs in 2006, found that company also had backdating problems when Jobs was its CEO. (That’s right, despite this history of shady business practises and outright criminal activity, Jobs still thought himself to be the best person to be the world’s moral arbiter. Amazing!)
As well, like many of world’s dictators and fascists, Jobs was uncomfortable with the idea of an empowered worker or a free press. Within the Apple company, even after Jobs’ passing, there remains a well-maintained and well-documented culture of fear and control. Apple employees (the few that have gotten out without being legally bound to secrecy by manipulative confidentiality agreements) have told us over the years about the bullying, intimidation, and fear that followed Jobs and became endemic in his company. While he was known to praise and inspire his employees, Jobs also did a really great job of scolding, belittling, and humiliating them – both publicly and privately. It’s well known that Apple even has a “Worldwide Loyalty Team” specializing in hunting down disgruntled employees and regularly confiscating and searching people’s mobile phones and personal computers. In possibly the creepiest example of Apple’s fascist tendencies, under orders from Steve Jobs, two of Apple’s private security agent searched the home of a San Francisco man while trying to track down a missing iPhone prototype. The man told reporters that company security agents arrived with plain-clothes police officers and did not identify themselves as private citizens. These Apple employees, pretending to be law enforcement, went so far as to threaten the man and his family with deportation when they failed to turn up any evidence of a stolen device.
So if that’s how Jobs and his Apple thugs treat folks in America you can imagine how well Apple’s workers are treated in his overseas sweatshops. It’s also well documented that Apple’s success was built on the backs of Chinese workers, many of whom were overworked and underage, and suffered the threat of brutal penalties for even the most minor mistakes. After British journalists infiltrated an Apple factory, reports emerged showing their Chinese labourers living and working under almost unthinkable conditions. For instance, despite 90% humidity and temperatures of 35 degrees in the summer, people under Apple’s pay were forced to live in cramped, prison-like conditions, without any air-conditioning. To save space, the company had workers sleeping eighteen to a room, on triple-decked bunk beds equipped with only raw bamboo mats for mattresses. It was reported that at these work camps a public address system blasts messaging at workers day and night. They’re told they must “value efficiency every minute, every second” and are reminded of how many items they’ve produced and how many they need to meet ever-growing quotas. Perhaps worst of all, the company (under Jobs’ keen watch, of course) worked hard to cover up the state of its factories and plight of its workers. And all of this while the company was bringing in $100 billion annually.
As you’d imagine, Jobs didn’t treat his competitors any better than he did his domestic or foreign employees. In recent years Apple has spent as much time and money attacking other companies in court as it has on designing new tools and toys. Most of these legal forays have turned out to be the wayward delusions of a paranoid and jealous control freak, rather than necessary, or even justified, legal encounters. On Jobs’ orders Apple has gone after anyone who dares produce anything that even remotely approximates any Apple product in appearance or function. Steve seems to have forgotten that his company is in the business of mimicry and no innovation. For example, Apple was a very late entrant into the mobile phone market. Long before the iPhone hit stores, LG announced a phone with a slim, rounded, rectangular form and symmetrical black borders around a large touch screen – the first of its kind. (LG did not sue Apple for its near-perfect knock-off.) This copycatting is not unusual for Apple but is its business model. Almost all of the devices built by Apple have their design heavily inspired by iconic works of German consumer products company Braun and its chief designer Deiter Rams. These were products and design elements that helped establish Braun’s name and design dominance forty years before Apple adopted them as their own. This borrowing was so noticeable and out of hand that Apples head designer was forced to explain himself and admit to his adoration and imitation of the creative genius behind Braun. Despite this, neither Rams nor Braun sought legal action against Apple. It seems it takes a special kind of hypocrite and egomaniac to go there. All in all this behaviour doesn’t reflect well on Apple’s reputation as the polished, confident, industry leader. Instead, by throwing such regular and childish tantrums, it seems like the company was and is still, more than anything, weak and out of control. In fact, most industry observers even agree that Apple’s attacks on Samsung and others were mostly “sloppy,” “transparently false,” “full of nonsense,” and “not the action of a company in a position of strength.”
You wonder if the company seems less than enthusiastic about competition and seeing others thrive, that maybe that’s some reflection of its creator. And then you learn that the man behind Apple never embraced philanthropy of any kind and even seemed opposed to it. We’re told that, after returning to Apple in 1997, Jobs closed all of Apple’s philanthropic programs and refused to reinstate them despite the company’s tremendous and ever-growing profits. While it is possible that Steve Jobs gave anonymously, or that he’s been generous in his will, but to date Jobs has no record of ever giving to charity – despite being one of the wealthiest people in the history of money. This in contrast to his arch-nemesis, the evil and dastardly Bill Gates, who has pledged $60 billion to charity and joined Warren Buffet in publicly pressuring fellow billionaires to be more generous with their wealth. Or contrast Jobs and Apple with the founder of IKEA, Ingvar Kamprad, who runs one of the largest charitable foundations and the largest non-profit on the planet, INGKA, in operation since 1982.
Given the noted struggles with social responsibility, you wonder what his family life was like. And then you read in Fortune magazine that Jobs, given the little we know, seemed pretty irresponsible there too. For example, when Jobs’ daughter was born, he spent two years denying paternity – insisting in court documents that he was infertile and that she couldn’t possibly be his child. Despite his being the father and already being a very wealthy man, the dispute meant that his baby and her mother were forced into welfare. Nice! In another related insight, further evidence Jobs thought he was above the law and didn’t need to play by the rules, he insisted on driving both his Porsche and Mercedes Benz without licence plates. When asked why he didn’t plate his cars Jobs said childishly, “It’s just a little game I like to play.”
I’m mostly confused about the Jobs legacy, and I think everyone else is too. At the very least it doesn’t seem like he was a particularly nice guy. But it’s more than that too. We describe Jobs with words like genius and compare him to people like Nicola Tesla. (And he liked to spend millions on ad campaigns that associate himself and his work with that of John Lennon,Nelson Mandela, and Mahatma Gandhi.) But was he a genius, a pacifist revolutionary, or even an inventor? As far as I can tell Steve Jobs was a salesman. He didn’t appear to be an engineer or technician, a designer or developer, or even very creative. Instead he told the smart creative types he hired what to design (produced it through what was essentially slave labour) and then sold their work to you, charging the highest mark-up of any electronics on the market.
No doubt Steve Jobs brought many attractive objects to market. And he can be credited with making technology for the technologically challenged – no small feat. He also returned to Apple and made piles of money for them long after the world had completely written the company off. For this Jobs will undoubtedly serve as a role model for generations of business people. But is Apple really a model company, some kind of high water mark against which others should be measured? And is Steve Jobs really the inspirational role model we want our children to look up to? (I ask this with the knowledge that there are already films and children’s books deifying the man...) I, for one, sincerely hope not.
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