Apple Inc. pays its CEO more, and those at the bottom less, than any other US company. [View all]

[Lionel Mandrake]

On the one hand, according to an AP story dated January 10, 2012,

Tim Cook could well end up being the highest-paid chief executive in the U.S. in 2011 after Apple Inc. granted him 1 million restricted stock units in August for taking the reins shortly before co-founder Steve Jobs died.

An Associated Press review of a securities filing shows that Cook's pay package was valued at $378 million.

Read more:
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-cook-pay-20120110,0,5116180.story

On the other hand, according to Sue Halpern's review of Walter Isaacson's book Steve Jobs (in The New York Review of Books), Apple's products

come from places that do not make us better people for owning them, the factories in China where more than a dozen young workers have committed suicide, some by jumping; where workers must now sign a pledge stating that they will not try to kill themselves but if they do, their families will not seek damages; where three people died and fifteen were injured when dust exploded; where 137 people exposed to a toxic chemical suffered nerve damage; where Apple offers injured workers no recompense; where workers, some as young as thirteen, according to an article in The New York Times, typically put in seventy-two-hour weeks, sometimes more, with minimal compensation, few breaks, and little food, to satisfy the overwhelming demand generated by the theatrics, the marketing, the packaging, the consummate engineering, and the herd instinct; and where, it goes without saying, the people who make all this cannot afford to buy it?

While it may be convenient to suppose that Apple is no different than any other company doing business in China—which is as fine a textbook example of a logical fallacy as there is—in reality, it is worse. According to a study reported by Bloomberg News last January, Apple ranked at the very bottom of twenty-nine global tech firms “in terms of responsiveness and transparency to health and environmental concerns in China.”

Read more:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/jan/12/who-was-steve-jobs/?pagination=false