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In 2011, pitching for approval for Apple’s new headquarters in what was his last public appearance, Steve Jobs told city councillors in Cupertino, California, that the company had “a shot at building the best office building in the world”. Opened in 2017, Apple Park is a circular temple of high technology. It nods to the perfectionism of the company’s founder, from its integrated door handles to the distressed-stone cladding of its yoga room and its tree-filled inner-ring park.
It is a long way from this Silicon Valley palace to workers’ cramped living quarters in “iPhone City” in Zhengzhou, the Chinese factory town that earned notoriety a year ago when inhabitants protested at Covid-19 curbs. Yet Foxconn, the biggest iPhone-maker, is now replicating this model in India as it seeks to house tens of thousands of workers serving the Apple supply chain.
Apple is missing an opportunity here to step in and emulate the great philanthrocapitalists of the past by helping Foxconn create state of the art worker accommodation.
Sir Titus Salt, a splendidly bewhiskered Victorian textile magnate, created Saltaire, a model community near Bradford, in the 1850s. Railcar industrialist George Pullman built a town near Chicago for his employees in 1880. George Cadbury fashioned Arts-and-Craft homes in Bournville, near Birmingham, for chocolate-factory workers.
The design principles behind all these homes were similar. William Hesketh Lever, the “Soap King”, built the village of Port Sunlight in Cheshire for workers and their families. In 1888, the co-founder of what became part of Unilever said he aimed to provide “semi-detached houses with gardens back and front in which they will be able to know more about the science of life than they can in any back slum, and in which they will learn that there is more enjoyment in life than in the mere going to and returning from work and looking forward to Saturday night to draw their wages”.
Drawing on similar inspiration, the Apple iDorm could offer every user a beautifully designed space with natural light and ventilation. It could provide access not only to the latest technology (Apple’s, naturally) and leisure facilities, but also to landscaped outdoor parkland. It could be “a wonderfully open environment for people to create, collaborate and work together”, to quote Jony Ive, Apple’s then chief design officer, on the opening of Apple Park.
As things stand, when the iPhone is a museum piece and manufacturing is fully automated and managed by AI, the barracks where workers now bunk will not merit special status for their architectural or historical interest as parts of Bournville have done. iPhone City is an improbable candidate to join Saltaire as a Unesco World Heritage Site.
Then, as now, higher productivity was usually the underlying goal of the great industrialist benefactors. Company towns in effect bound their residents to the factory, limiting their ability to defect to competitors further away. Some projects were motivated by a desire to stifle or exclude trade unions. Many were governed by strict rules covering temperance (there were no pubs within the original Bournville estate), personal hygiene or moral probity.
Benevolence could tip over into restrictive paternalism. Protest, as in some iPhone factory towns, was not far from the surface. In 1894, Pullman workers went on strike after George Pullman cut wages, igniting a boycott that affected much of the US railroad network. A significant factor driving the decision to down tools was the tycoon’s refusal to cut rents on the homes where most workers lived.
Jobs’s legacy seems more secure, including his exquisite attention to detail, applied even to the inner workings of Apple devices. If his successors want to honour him, they should take the same approach in the unobserved crevices of the iPhone supply chain and aim to design the “best worker dormitories in the world”.
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