This is one of those stories that does most of the speaking for itself. I should inform you, by way of full disclosure, that I'm writing this on a Mac.
Factories making sought-after Apple iPads and iPhones in China are forcing staff to sign pledges not to commit suicide, an investigation has revealed.
At least 14 workers at Foxconn factories in China have killed themselves in the last 16 months as a result of horrendous working conditions.
Many more are believed to have either survived attempts or been stopped before trying at the Apple supplier's plants in Chengdu or Shenzen.
And why might so many workers be committed suicide that it's necessary to force the survivors to promise not to?
# Excessive overtime was rife, despite a legal limit of 36 hours a month. One payslip showed a worker did 98 hours of overtime in one month, the Observer reported.
# During peak periods of demand for the iPad, workers were made to take only one day off in 13.
# Badly performing workers were humiliated in front of colleagues.
# Workers are banned from talking and are made to stand up for their 12-hour shifts.
This "improvement" in conditions at the factory is rather telling:
Anti-suicide nets were put up around the dormitory buildings on the advice of psychologists.
Factory management says the overtime is voluntary, and Apple says it has standards that Chinese factories don't live up to. Oh-kay. This is no doubt contributing to the problem.
Apple has been facing sever shortages in the supply of the iPad 2 around the world. The increased demand is pushing Apple to force Foxconn to increase its production efficiency.
Apple, of course, is not the only American company exploiting workers in foreign countries, although few companies are as respected or as successful -- Apple is the second most valuable company in the world -- and few executives are as revered as Steve Jobs. I don't think it's a coincidence that most of the coverage of the Apple Suicides can be found in British publications.
Without consistent negative publicity, there's no chance that Apple would start respecting the human rights of workers in its factories. Recall the furor over Nike's sweatshops. It was negative publicity that forced Phil Knight in the nineties to announce reforms in a speech at the National Press Club. (Although activists say those reforms were far from sufficient.)
The condition in faraway factories is more than a human rights story, of course, and more than a foreign one. The ability of American companies to exploit foreign workers contributes to that great sucking sound. There are to easy answers to this problem; but one thing we don't need, certainly, are more NAFTA-style trade deals.