Apple has revealed it directly or indirectly employs 2.4 million people in the United States.
The company says that this number is four times greater than the number of US citizens it employed eight years ago and that it will directly contribute $350 billion to the US economy by 2023.
The figure of 2.4 million people includes Apple’s employees – those who work at retail stores, in Apple Campus, and more, and those working for third-parties in the United States, creating or testing components for Apple devices.
Other employees come from services such as battery testing and manufacturing, which Apple outsources to firms such as Maccor.
The App Store is another big employer for Apple – the company says it’s responsible for 1.9 million American jobs, up more than 300,000 over the past two years.
Maccor, for example, is just one of 9,000 American suppliers that Apple spent a collective $60 billion dollars with last year, supporting 450,000 jobs.
“The relationship with Apple has been tremendous and company-changing for us,” says the president of Maccor, Andy MacKay. “We want to build the absolute best equipment we can build — we don’t want to cut corners. Apple is a company where quality is paramount and they push us constantly to see if we can make improvements in our commercial product.”
“There wasn’t any money in [our] family to put me through college and I was fortunate to get a full-ride scholarship from the company my mom worked for,” says Andy. “I always remembered that because it changed the trajectory of my life completely, so when the time came that we had the means, we wanted to see if we could help other people in the same way.”
“None of us who started this company would have believed that we would ever get to be anything like we are now,” he added. “We stand out on the production floor and just look at each other and say ‘Would you ever have thought when we were sitting at the kitchen table at that house a mile away from here that we’d ever be standing in the middle of a building like this?’ We had no idea what was in store for us.”
Of course, this statistic will be highly criticized by many – Apple claiming that it is responsible for 2.4 million jobs when 1.9 million of them are for independent developers on the App Store is a bit of a stretch, and many of the employees at third-party companies also work on products or components for other companies, not just Apple.
Still, it’s good to see that the firm is investing in the United States and that Apple is committed to supporting the US economy.
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