Apple: Making iPhones by exploiting Chinese workers?

Looks like “the wizards from Cupertino have a few skeletons in the closet in China,” said Thane Rosenbaum in TheDailyBeast.com. Just as Apple’s shareholders were celebrating record profits last week—$13.06 billion in just one quarter—The New York Times published an exposé describing how Chinese workers assembled the 37 million iPhones and 15.4 million iPads Apple sold in those three months. At the sprawling Foxconn plant in Shenzhen, an army of more than 200,000 workers puts the components together by hand, silently working 12-hour shifts, six days a week, while standing up. Their pay: about $17 a day. They sleep in cramped corporate dormitories, on side-by-side bunk beds. At least 19 Foxconn workers have killed themselves, most by throwing themselves off roofs; in response, factory bosses hung nets from roofs and balconies to deter jumpers. Apple customers face a stark moral dilemma, said Peter Cohan in Forbes.com. Do they keep buying—and fetishizing—Apple’s sleek, miraculous products now that they know the human cost of making them? Or are they “willing to boycott Apple to stop the carnage?”

If you really want to help the workers at Foxconn, said Tim Worstall, also in Forbes.com, go buy another iPhone. Seventeen dollars a day is good money in China, which is why a million workers have gone to Foxconn and “voluntarily signed up to work for those wages,” assembling high-tech products for a slew of U.S. companies, including HP, IBM, and Dell. If you’re going to boycott Apple, said Brooke Crothers in CNET.com, then you should boycott everything made in Chinese factories, including furniture, charcoal grills, nickel-cadmium batteries, and a host of other inexpensive consumer goods. The sad reality is that “human-intensive mass production is ugly,” and always has been, from the American industrial revolution to Japan’s manufacturing boom in the 1960s. If you look inside any high-volume factory, now or then, “you’ll get sick watching the sausage get made.”

Conditions need not be that ugly, said Heather Mallick in the Toronto Star. Apple has gotten filthy rich from sweatshop labor, amassing $100 billion in available cash. Why not charge a little more for its products, and spend that money improving the “industrial hell” of its Chinese contractors? The New York Times estimated that improving wages and conditions at Foxconn to U.S. standards would add only $65 to the average cost of an iPhone. Better still, said the Memphis Commercial Appeal in an editorial, bring those jobs back home. The company Steve Jobs founded in a garage once embodied the American dream. Now that it’s the planet’s richest tech company, Apple should charge its teams of geniuses with figuring out “how to start producing machines ‘made in America’ again.”

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That’s not going to happen, said Jordan Weissmann in TheAtlantic.com. Manufacturing Apple products in the U.S. simply isn’t possible—and not only because of labor costs. China has become a global hub of electronics manufacturing, with a vast “supply chain” of factories making tiny screws, glass screens, and other crucial component parts. In addition, the U.S. lacks enough engineers with “mid-level technical skills” to oversee a high-tech production line like Apple’s. China graduates 600,000 engineers every year, compared with 70,000 in the U.S. For better or for worse, the iPhone, the iPad, and the whole glittering array of Apple products will continue to be Made in China.