A recent article in the New York Times investigated events and attitudes that led Apple to outsource the manufacture of its iPhone rather than continue to employ Americans to do the job.
Betsey Stevenson, Chief Economist of the U.S. Department of Labor, stated in October 2011 that American "companies once felt an obligation to support American workers, even when it wasn't the best financial choice." She continued, "That's disappeared. Profits and efficiency have trumped generosity."
Some feel that the issue at hand is loyalty and that generosity has little to do with it.
At this point, the iPhone is manufactured in China. Chinese workers stream in from their countryside in pursuit of high paying jobs are faced with harsh realities. The vast majority earn approximately one dollar per hour. Shifts range from 10 to 12 hours, most work six days a week.
The workers at Foxconn, the world's largest maker of electronic components, live in dormitories on the work site. There they are separated from family and friends for extended periods.
Apple is correct in believing that these work circumstances and wages would not attract many American workers. But this has nothing to do with whether Americans are less hard-working or less efficient than their Chinese counterparts.
It has to do with American expectations for home, family, social and living situations. Most Americans have been acculturated to believe that more is possible for them.
Those who line up for onerous work assignments demonstrate qualities that have little to do being harder or more efficient workers.
Foxconn laborers demonstrate that they are desperate, disenfranchised and disaffiliated. Otherwise they would not put up with these conditions.
In capitalizing on the availability of cheap labor Apple pushes fellow Americans towards ratcheting down their expectations, lowering their horizons.
A current Apple executive was quoted saying that, "We don't have an obligation to solve America's problems. Our only obligation is making the best product possible."
The obligations that a company has to the society from which its success derives must include a human and humane, not simply a financial, imperative.
Can a respectable company regard their workers as interchangeable widgets within the industrial flat world and still maintain a reputation of respectabilitry?
When partners — partners in business or in personal relationships — sidestep negotiation of differences that prevent them from seeing eye to eye the fabric of community frays and rips.
That Apple — and they certainly are not alone in making this choice — has abandonned any resonsibility to the American work force is a cause of sadness. Sadness, not as an abstraction, but as a gut level reality that lives within the body politic.
It takes hard work and perseverance to include diverse members of a community in the decision making process.
It takes work for most couples to include each other in a genuine dialogue in which both take each others thoughts and feelings seriously.
The seemingly easy way out — to seek advantage outside the current relationship and allow the bond that had been forged to wither — only seems easy. In the long run disloyalty in business and in families plummets morale. It creates emotional disturbances that resonate for decades.
Knowing that there is a stratum of individuals, success-meisters, who flaunt the need to listen to those on whose labor they depend sends an emotional chill through the American ethos.
Ask yourself how you respond to the stresses and challenges of your most important relationships. Do you leave yourself enough room to respond to your partner in terms of the way they see their situation and not only in terms of the things that you would like to do or achieve with your partner?
The answer to this question is crucial.
Confronting the challenge it poses can improve and enrich your most precious relationships. It also can help to renew our culture.
Remember, love and good feelings are plentiful yet elusive; I'll be around to help you locate and develop them in the Middle Ground.