I have some on the ground experience with Chinese manufacturing and what I saw was fine - it was relatively low-paying transitional work people do for a few years when they're young - like working at McDonalds used to be here - before they move onto a better job. The conditions aren't great by our standards but it's a much better working environment (and better paying one) than the alternatives available in the region.
US concerns have largely been overblown outrage clickbait. At the peak of the hysteria Mike Daisey did an interview on NPR's This American Life based on a one-man show ("The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs") in which he claimed to have personal knowledge of how bad the conditions are at Apple factories. I saw his show and it seemed clear to me Mike Daisey was lying; it eventually did turn out he had invented and/or exaggerated most of the details and NPR had to retract the episode:
Regarding Foxconn suicides: It's hard for us to wrap our heads around the sheer scale of Foxconn - the fact that one company in one area had more workers than the entire population of Wyoming throws off our intuitions! Even at its peak the suicide rate at Foxconn appears to have been lower than the suicide rate for China in general, much lower than the suicide rate for Chinese college students (the closest age group we have data on) and even less than the suicide rate for American college students. So there was nothing unusual in having that number of suicides given how many people lived and worked there. Did they put up fencing around one building? Yes, but we do that here too whenever one building or bridge or cliff becomes an attractive area for suicides. For instance, San Francisco right now is spending over 200 million dollars on an improved suicide barrier for the Golden Gate Bridge:
There is indeed a range of factory work. Some is unpleasant but most of it is quite pleasant. In particular electronics assembly tends to be on the more-pleasant end of the scale because electronics assembly is sensitive work. Our traditional idea of "sweatshops" - hot, dirty, sweaty, poorly-ventilated, poorly-lit work - was associated with a particular era of garment manufacturing. Electronics assembly is absolutely nothing like that and the reason isn't for the benefit of the workers, it's for the benefit of the product. Electronics assembly is done in rooms that are clean and well-lit and well-ventilated and temperature-controlled because if they weren't, the product wouldn't work. Circuit boards hate dust and moisture; companies get the best yield rate in terms of working product at the end of the line when the workers are comfortable and clean and there's no dust and they can see clearly what they are doing and they have the right tools available for the job.
So far as I could tell, the workers on the line were happy and comfortable.
Caveat: My personal up-close experience is limited to a couple medium-sized firms in Guangdong: IDT (Integrated Display Technology) and GSL (Group Sense Limited). IDT is the Chinese company that assembled LCD-containing products for Sharper Image under the house brand "Oregon Scientific" in the late 1990s-early 2000s. I worked with these companies as the QA representative of Pocket Science aka Pocket.com while they were building PocketMail products. In that capacity I talked to the assemblers and their managers and sometimes worked beside them on the assembly line.
US concerns have largely been overblown outrage clickbait. At the peak of the hysteria Mike Daisey did an interview on NPR's This American Life based on a one-man show ("The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs") in which he claimed to have personal knowledge of how bad the conditions are at Apple factories. I saw his show and it seemed clear to me Mike Daisey was lying; it eventually did turn out he had invented and/or exaggerated most of the details and NPR had to retract the episode:
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2012/03/16/148761812...
Regarding Foxconn suicides: It's hard for us to wrap our heads around the sheer scale of Foxconn - the fact that one company in one area had more workers than the entire population of Wyoming throws off our intuitions! Even at its peak the suicide rate at Foxconn appears to have been lower than the suicide rate for China in general, much lower than the suicide rate for Chinese college students (the closest age group we have data on) and even less than the suicide rate for American college students. So there was nothing unusual in having that number of suicides given how many people lived and worked there. Did they put up fencing around one building? Yes, but we do that here too whenever one building or bridge or cliff becomes an attractive area for suicides. For instance, San Francisco right now is spending over 200 million dollars on an improved suicide barrier for the Golden Gate Bridge:
https://www.marinij.com/2020/08/26/golden-gate-bridge-suicid...
There is indeed a range of factory work. Some is unpleasant but most of it is quite pleasant. In particular electronics assembly tends to be on the more-pleasant end of the scale because electronics assembly is sensitive work. Our traditional idea of "sweatshops" - hot, dirty, sweaty, poorly-ventilated, poorly-lit work - was associated with a particular era of garment manufacturing. Electronics assembly is absolutely nothing like that and the reason isn't for the benefit of the workers, it's for the benefit of the product. Electronics assembly is done in rooms that are clean and well-lit and well-ventilated and temperature-controlled because if they weren't, the product wouldn't work. Circuit boards hate dust and moisture; companies get the best yield rate in terms of working product at the end of the line when the workers are comfortable and clean and there's no dust and they can see clearly what they are doing and they have the right tools available for the job.
So far as I could tell, the workers on the line were happy and comfortable.
Caveat: My personal up-close experience is limited to a couple medium-sized firms in Guangdong: IDT (Integrated Display Technology) and GSL (Group Sense Limited). IDT is the Chinese company that assembled LCD-containing products for Sharper Image under the house brand "Oregon Scientific" in the late 1990s-early 2000s. I worked with these companies as the QA representative of Pocket Science aka Pocket.com while they were building PocketMail products. In that capacity I talked to the assemblers and their managers and sometimes worked beside them on the assembly line.
PocketMail: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PocketMail
GSL: http://www.gsl.com.hk/eng/e_about.asp
IDT: http://www.idthk.com/