Is Chinese manufacturing a glimpse of our future? Enjoy those cheap iPods

Thirteen suicides in the five months since January 23 of this year at the Foxconn manufacturing site in Shenzhen, China, have brought into focus the human cost of cheap electronics.  Foxconn is $60 billion dollar contract manufacturer of electronic components for Apple, Dell and Hewlett-Packard.  It houses employees in enormous nine-to-a-room dormitories and works them 11 hour shifts, seven days a week.  Uniformed employees' activities in their "barracks" are severely limited, with even consumption of snacks being denied. 

If work orders demand, employees may be required to work as many as 286 hours per month (as the pay stub of the first suicidal 22-year old demonstrated) and they are subjected to harassment and unreasonable demands on a constant basis--the first suicide had been assigned to cleaning toilets 11 hours a day after a run-in with his supervisor.   With overtime for 90 hour weeks, they can earn the equivalent of a dollar an hour.  Tasks are monitored with a stopwatch, the dorms regularly run out of hot water for showers, and employees may be subjected to intense discipline, including the public recitation of "self-criticisms" (a punishment borrowed from hard-line communist dogma).  You may listen to your iPod without guilt, however, as Steven Jobs has pronounced that Foxconn is "not a sweatshop."