Steve Jobs Biography: Apple CEO Warned Obama He Would Be 'One-Term President'
Steve Jobs warned President Barack Obama that he would be a one-term president unless he adopted business-friendly policies like China, according to a new biography about the recently deceased former Apple CEO.
In the hotly-anticipated new biography by Walter Isaacson, Jobs was blunt with Obama: "You're headed for a one-term presidency," the tech guru told the president. The Huffington Post, who acquired an early copy of the book, said that Jobs insisted that the Obama administration needed to be more like China, where they have less "regulations and unnecessary costs," so businesses can flourish.
Jobs had come under criticism for the way factory workers in China who make Apple products have been treated.
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Two years ago, workers at a factory in Suzhou, China, were poisoned when Taiwanese electronics supplier Wintek, which was working under contract with Apple to make the touchscreens, replaced alcohol with N-hexane in the manufacturing process to speed up production.
Prolonged exposure to N-hexane has been known to cause damage to the central nervous system, and when workers affected by the chemical wrote to Jobs, asking him for help in medical treatment and compensation for lost wages, they allegedly never heard back from anybody at Apple, much less Jobs.
"I think they knew the chemical was dangerous," said a female factory worker who asked not to be revealed when she was interviewed by ABC in an investigative report on the factory last year. "But if they used another chemical, out production would not have increased. Using N-hexane was more efficient."
"Steve Jobs was indifferent to our poisoning and evaded his responsibility," said Jia Jingchuan in a separate statement released by the Hong Kong labor group Students and Scholars Against Corporate Misbehavior (SACOM), which called on the new Apple CEO to address the situation.
In addition, Apple came under fire last year when it was revealed that FoxConn, a Chinese manufacturing company that makes the majority of Apple products, had a problem of employees committing suicide in abundance. At least twelve people killed themselves. Several more tried, but were prevented by co-workers.
In the new Jobs biography, The Huffington Post also reported that the former CEO criticized America's education system, which he believed was "crippled by union work rules," Isaacson wrote.
"Until the teachers' unions were broken, there was almost no hope for education reform," Jobs said, and proposed that principals should be allowed to hire and fire based on merit. He also proposed that schools should stay open until 6 p.m., and school years last 11 months.
Despite Jobs criticism of Obama’s policies, he nevertheless offered to create re-election ads for the president in 2012.
