Many of us carry around campus one of these gems of technology – iPads, iPhones, iPods. Steve Jobs has achieved the status of legend. But how does Apple manage to produce one innovative product after another so fast?

In 2006, questions about living conditions in the factories that supplied Apple arose. The British newspaper The Mail on Sunday reported that the supplier FoxConn housed 200,000 of its employees in a giant dormitory where visits were forbidden. The employees worked for about 15 hours a day for a measly $50 a month, and had to work standing up.

In 2010, a dozen workers at FoxConn – today the biggest iPad manufacturer – committed suicide, reportedly due to the working conditions that were both physically and psychologically inhumane – excruciatingly long shifts, no right to talk, constant surveillance and humiliation.

Apple has a code of conduct for its suppliers, which includes treating workers with dignity and banning child labor, indecent work hours, health hazards and a slew of other types of bad working conditions.

But these rules don’t mean much if Apple doesn’t enforce them or if it encourages its suppliers to violate them by demanding both low production costs and irreproachable quality. Come to think of it, isn’t that what we as consumers demand from Apple?

That’s right – cool technology comes at a price. Without us driving the demand for newer and cheaper apple goods, the living conditions of these workers would not be so deplorable. The New York Times quoted an Apple executive as pointing out that “You can either manufacture in comfortable, worker-friendly factories, or you can reinvent the product every year, and make it better and faster and cheaper, which requires factories that seem harsh by American standards […] And right now, customers care more about a new iPhone than working conditions in China.”

The most recent incidents, reported by the Times, were two explosions in iPad factories that killed four workers. The explosions were due to aluminium dust, a hazardous material that made workers in polishing workshops scintillate because they could not wash it off. Two months before the first explosion, a Hong Kong advocacy group had sent a report to Apple warning of the safety risks due to aluminium dust. This report was reportedly ignored, and so was the first explosion – factories were not inspected, and the same type of explosion happened again in December.

The year before, Steve Jobs had asserted that “Apple does one of the best jobs of any companies in our industry, and maybe in any industry, of understanding the working conditions in our supply chain.” If consumers understood them as well, would they still be buying Apple products?

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