Apple has made its first attempt to quantify how many American jobs can be credited to the sale of its iPads and other products, a group that includes the Apple engineers who design the devices and the drivers who deliver them — even the people who build the trucks that get them there.
On Friday, the company published the results of a study it commissioned saying that it had "created or supported" 514,000 U.S. jobs. The study is an effort to show that Apple's benefit to the U.S. job market goes far beyond the 47,000 people it directly employs here. Apple, based in Cupertino, Calif., released the study on its website but declined to say why it published the results. The company's employment practices have come under closer examination. Apple and other high-tech companies, including Internet companies, create relatively few jobs compared with other stalwarts of U.S. business, like General Motors and General Electric in their heyday. Apple, which has recently become the most valuable company in the world and holds nearly $100 billion in cash, has created more jobs overseas, approximately 700,000 through a network of suppliers that make iPhones, iPads and other products.
A number of companies, including Microsoft and Facebook, have commissioned similar research aiming to tally up such indirect employment, by suppliers and other partners. The use of "job multipliers" has become common practice, sometimes put forth by businesses when they lobby for tax breaks from local and state governments.
The accuracy of the Apple calculation may well be debated among economists for years. "Apple has a big effect, and big is about as precise as I can make it," said Gary P. Pisano, a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School. "It's hard to say the exact size."
David Autor, an economics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said via email that the "entire business of claiming 'direct and indirect' job creation is disreputable," because most of the workers Apple is taking credit for would have been employed elsewhere in the company's absence.
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''But of course, they might not have been as well paid or gratified with their work," Autor said. "We'll never know."
The Analysis Group, the consulting firm Apple hired, concluded that 257,000 jobs were in companies that work directly with Apple, including employees in Kentucky and New York at Corning Inc., a company that creates glass for the iPhone, and people at a Samsung plant in Texas that makes computer chips for its devices.
