Randy Murray presents a different view in An Observer From Shenzhen—Thoughts on Apple’s Recent Bad Press.

Do workers in Foxconn factories who build products for Apple, Dell, HP, and others, work long hours at tedious tasks? Yes they do. Do they work for a fraction of what a worker in the US, Japan, or even Korea would? Yes they do.

Are they being enslaved? Clearly, they are not.

I suspect that a lot of the heat from the recent press comes from a lack of understanding about Chinese culture, their rapid change from manual agrarian life to high-tech manufacturing, and the significant differences and scales of our economies.

I don’t know what the truth is, but I am glad to see a reasonable dissenting discussion on this issue.