The New York Times on the human cost of industrial accidents at Apple's foreign suppliers:
Troubling, the groups say, is some suppliers' disregard for workers' health. Two years ago, 137 workers at an Apple supplier in eastern China were injured after they were ordered to use a poisonous chemical to clean iPhone screens. Within seven months last year, two explosions at iPad factories, including in Chengdu, killed four people and injured 77. Before those blasts, Apple had been alerted to hazardous conditions inside the Chengdu plant, according to a Chinese group that published that warning.
Success brings with it responsibility, you could say, proportional to the buying power it represents. It's unfair to pin this endemic problem on Apple alone, but when Steve Jobs talked of "restaurants and movie theaters and hospitals and swimming pools", it invites a closer look at what happens outside of Foxconn's stage-managed tours.
