Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation

by Anne Helen Petersen

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 employs 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. “More and more companies are laying off permanent staff and relying on contract workers and outsourcing to carry out their business,” Apple told its employees. “The emerging workplace has a head and no body. It centralizes free-floating talent resources as necessary to meet current needs, and changes size from moment to moment as the marketplace dictates.”22 “A head and no body” is why Apple can claim that its hands are tied when it comes to evidence of extreme overwork in Chinese factories. In fact, it has no “hands” at all: Those companies aren’t technically Apple factories; they just happen to produce the technology that becomes an Apple product. And the success of this philosophy is also a major reason why Apple is one of the most valuable companies on the stock exchange. Apple does all the good, brilliant stuff. All the messy, exploitative stuff that makes those good, brilliant th...