Apple Claims Credit for 514,000 U.S. Jobs

Many people are concerned about the labor that supports the creation of Apple products overseas, for instance at the enormous Foxconn facility in China. But look over here, Apple said today. Among manufacturing, transportation, app development and Apple’s own workforce, Apple estimated it supports 514,000 jobs in the United States.

Nobody at Apple is running for U.S. president at the moment, but that doesn’t mean the company can’t brag about how many American jobs it has created. In addition to 47,000 jobs at Apple, the largest portion of that figure is an estimated 257,000 jobs supported by Apple at companies like Corning and FedEx. That includes the people who deliver and build Apple products and components, professional and technical services, and healthcare. The estimate comes from a standardized “employment multiplier” applied to Apple’s spending by an outside firm called Analysis Group.

And then added to that, Apple said 210,000 iOS-related jobs have been created since 2007, funded by $4 billion in royalties paid to date. The iOS number piggybacks on recent research by TechNet.

For comparison — sort of, given that it was a totally different study sponsored by Facebook — last September, the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business found that Facebook’s own app economy had created 182,000 new U.S. jobs in the previous year.

As for Apple’s workforce, of the company’s 47,000 jobs in the U.S., 19,500 were added since 2008, the company said. Apple noted that its call centers are in the U.S., and its retail employees are mostly full-time.