The Betrayal of the American Dream by Donald L. Barlett, James B. Steele Page B

other facilities, the area has lost more than 40 percent of its manufacturing and information technology jobs. More than 15,000 jobs—paying from $55,000 to $80,000 plus benefits—simply vanished, according to local economic development officials, sucking an estimated $500 million out of the local economy. In their place, jobs in call centers for insurance, finance, and cell phones were created—jobs that paid about half of what the IT jobs paid, according to local officials.
    Bill Stamp was one of Apple’s first employees at Fountain. He was twenty-six years old when he joined the company in 1984 at its Fremont assembly plant, recording and keeping track of the myriad parts that went into each personal computer, from hard drives to screws. When the company offered him an opportunity to get in on the ground floor at its new assembly plant in Colorado, he jumped at the chance. His wife-to-be, Christy, also an Apple employee, landed a job at Fountain as well, and later he moved up to a supervisory position in shipping. Gregarious and down to earth, Stamp is the first to tell you he was never a computer geek. He was a “materials guy” whose job was to feed the production line: “My job was to get it to the line and make sure it was a quality product ready for the line to use.”
    Apple instilled in him and his coworkers a quality control ethic that made them want to turn out the best possible product. “There was such a camaraderie,” he said. “When we got off work, all we could talk about was Apple, Apple, Apple. We’ve got to do this or that. And we had the freedom, a process, to bring that up, and these things would then often come about. It was phenomenal, one big family.” It was an exciting time. Stamp said the folks in the factory thought of themselves as responsible for helping to build the company. They were appreciated and well compensated, and they basked in the glow of working for Apple.
    Stamp said that he and Christy moved into a comfortable bilevel house set on five acres near the Black Forest, an area of abundant ponderosa pines and natural beauty north of Colorado Springs. “We were living large,” he said. “We thought it would go on forever.”
    But when earnings fell in 1996 and the moneymen on Wall Street decided Apple was not living up to their expectations, the company was forced to unload assets to raise cash. The Fountain plant was sold, just four years after it had opened. Fountain was profitable and well run, but Wall Street’s relentless focus on short-term earnings demanded results. An Alabama-based electronics vendor and outsourcing specialist, SCI Systems Inc., bought Fountain for $75 million with an agreement to continue manufacturing Apple computers on-site for three years.
    The plant’s ownership wasn’t the only thing that changed. Stamp recalled that the new managers were “arrogant as hell,” dismissive of Apple veterans, and uninterested in feedback from employees. “What a culture shock that was,” he said. After having worked in a collaborative environment that encouraged ideas from the ground up, the essence of a continuously innovative culture, all he ever heard from the Alabama imports were relentless orders to “git ’er done.” When the contract to make Macs expired in 1998, Apple didn’t renew, and the manufacturing shifted offshore.
    Discouraged about Fountain’s future, Stamp left in 2001. He tried his hand in real estate in Colorado and held a series of supervisory jobs at less pay in distribution and warehousing, first in Colorado and then in California. In 2008, when his job was shipped to Singapore, he hit a stone wall. Always before, he had been able at least to secure an interview that often led to a job—if only for a while. Now he would send out résumés listing his lengthy experience and wasn’t even getting a call.
    As the months ticked by, Stamp and his wife drew down their savings and tapped into retirement accounts to fund the fruitless