Companies looking to cut labor costs can rely on temps, outsource to subcontractors, kill a union—but they can also outsource by sending labor overseas, especially to countries where labor is cheap, because regulation and other forms of labor laws are slight, nonexistent, or unenforced. That’s what Apple does—and why it directly employees only 63,000 of the 750,000 workers who manufacture, assemble, and sell Apple products across the world.21 Apple announced that trajectory back in 1993, with the publication of an essay entitled “The Changed Nature of Workers and Work” in the company magazine.
