Inside Foxconn - James Fallows - The Atlantic

A preliminary perspective from James Fallows; on a related note, see How Obama or Romney Should Have Answered the iPad Question (AllThingsD)

"By chance, I watched that debate a few miles from where many of those iPads, Macs, and iPhones are made in southern China. The following day -- today, Thursday, China time -- I was inside the most famous of these outsourcing centers. This is the Foxconn "campus" in the Longhua area of Shenzhen, north of Hong Kong. Some 220,000 people work there; about a quarter of them live on site; and several thousand new employees are recruited, trained, and brought onto staff each week, because turnover at Foxconn and many of these Chinese manufacturing centers is so high. Foxconn has been controversial over the years because of allegations of sweatshop operation and of militaristic surveillance and discipline, plus a wave of worker suicides in 2010. I'll have more to say on the current state of Chinese manufacturing at Foxconn and elsewhere very soon, with a now-very-much-overdue article in the magazine. "

Inside Foxconn - James Fallows - The Atlantic