Apple emphasizes that its products generate many jobs beyond those who receive a paycheck from the company directly. The company estimates 1.5 million people work in the “app economy,” building and maintaining the mobile applications used on Apple products. Apple stores in 44 states tend to offer more generous pay and benefits than is standard in the retail industry. And it is growing quickly, including far from its California headquarters, such as with 6,000 jobs in Austin, Tex., at an average salary of $77,000 a year, and many more indirectly through what it says is $50 billion in annual spending to suppliers in the United States.

“We’re responsible for creating over two million jobs in the U.S., across all 50 states,” said an Apple spokesman, “ranging from construction, customer care, retail and engineering to app development, manufacturing, operations and trucking. All Apple employees, whether full time or part time, are eligible for benefits and stock grants. We’re also fortunate to have skilled contractors that contribute to our products and services daily, along with over 9,000 suppliers in every state.”

Perhaps the biggest indictment of the more paternalistic approach taken by an earlier generation of corporate behemoths is that, Kodak, despite having been an early innovator in digital photography, is a shell of its former self. After a bankruptcy and many years of layoffs, the company now has only 2,700 employees in the United States and 6,100 worldwide.

But it is also clear that, across a range of job functions, industries and countries, the shift to a contracting economy has put downward pressure on compensation. Pay for janitors fell by 4 to 7 percent, and for security guards by 8 to 24 percent, in American companies that outsourced, Arindrajit Dube of the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and Ethan Kaplan of Stockholm University found in a 2010 paper.

These pay cuts appear to be fueling overall inequality. J. Adam Cobb of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and Ken-Hou Lin at the University of Texas found that the drop in big companies’ practice of paying relatively high wages to their low- and mid-level workers could have accounted for 20 percent of the wage inequality increase from 1989 to 2014.

The same forces that explain the difference between 1980s Kodak and today’s Apple have big implications not just for every blue-collar employee who punches a timecard, but also for white-collar professionals who swipe a badge.

Forklifts vs. 3D Maps

Phil Harnden was coming out of the Navy in 1970 when he applied for a job at Kodak, and soon was operating a forklift in a warehouse. He made $3 an hour, equivalent to $20 an hour today adjusted for inflation. That is roughly what an entry-level contracting job testing software pays.