THE retraction by "This American Life" of its Mike Daisey story on Apple is the most physically uncomfortable radio listening I've ever experienced. It's full of moments so humiliating that if it weren't for the fact that host Ira Glass himself was the person Mr Daisey had betrayed, it would have seemed exploitative to linger on them. Perhaps journalists are especially sensitive to the pain of being exposed in false communication. I've never "cooked a story", as the Mike Kelly character puts it in "Shattered Glass", but I can still feel the shame from an article a decade ago in which I mentioned an activist's ethnicity, drew a conclusion from it, and then discovered after publication that I'd assumed the wrong ethnicity and never thought to fact-check it. Like Mr Glass (Ira, not Stephen) at the beginning of the retraction episode, I feel a certain level of empathy for Mr Daisey: there's not really any justification for his decision to present things he'd read about as if they'd happened to him, but you can kind of understand it. In a slightly different theatrical genre, that of, say, "Swimming to Cambodia", his exaggeration and reappropriation might have been acceptable, though not in the show he actually presented, which clearly seemed to be making journalistic truth claims. And not, obviously, on "This American Life".

In view of the fact that Mr Daisey was lying, I have to revisit the post I wrote on this subject a while back. Like other journos, I feel like I ought to have known Mr Daisey's account was off-base. I've stood outside factory gates at suppliers to big foreign companies in Vietnam, trying to get workers to talk about their complaints. I never met any who were underage. That doesn't mean there are no underage workers in Vietnamese factories on contract to foreign companies; it means they're a very small minority, and you're unlikely to meet any just by spending a few hours standing at the factory gates. As Josh Barro writes at, almost all of the incidents of poor labour practices at Apple suppliers that Mr Daisey reports did actually happen. It's just that he himself didn't see many of them. And the fact that he claimed to have seen them all so easily, as a non-journalist with no experience in China who just showed up at the gates of Foxconn one day with an interpreter, made it seem as though these violations were incredibly widespread and routine. As Mr Barro says:

[A] key reason Daisey's account was effective is that it depicted a density of horror at Foxconn's Chinese plants. If Daisey could visit just one city for just six days and come out with as much vivid material as he did, imagine what is going on at Foxconn's facilities all over the country. Admitting that many of the conditions he discussed were not uniform and not necessarily common—and not, so far as he could tell, present in Shenzhen—would have made his critique much less damning.

What conclusions should we draw, then, about Apple in China? Here's the conclusion Matthew Yglesias thinks we should draw (Mr Barro agrees), which is, I think, not the conclusion we should draw.

[W]hat Apple stands accused of is complicity in the misery of Chinese workers but its real crime often seems to be exposing our delicate western sensibilities to the misery. You don't read articles about working conditions in factories making socks destined for export to Kazakhstan, and you don't read articles about working conditions on the rice farms that people eagerly leave to go toil in the sock factory. That rice and those socks are invisible to us and so too are the workers. What we need to see and hear about are bad conditions wherever they may be, not just the ones that provide the appealing news hook. When you read something bad about a Foxconn factory and then see that thousands of people line up for the chance of a job at one of them, that really ought to make you wonder. What were those guys doing the day before they decided to stand in line? How did that look?

In my view, this misses the point completely. I don't know what other people are mentally accusing Apple of, but in my book, the relevant question in this whole drama has always been very simple: is Apple adequately ensuring that its Supplier Code of Conduct is being enforced, and is that code of conduct itself adequate? The question is not whether it is sinful to buy an iPhone. The question is not whether Apple is a force for good or evil in the world. The question is not whether trade with China is good or bad. The question is not whether iPhones should be manufactured in America. The question is simply whether Apple is, knowingly or through negligence, allowing widespread violations of its Supplier Code of Conduct, and hence allowing misery to enter the world that has no reason to be here.

It's certainly true that very many Chinese people want to work at Foxconn, and that the conditions at its plants are better than at many other factories in China and far better than conditions in isolated rural agricultural villages. This is precisely why it should be so easy for Foxconn to ensure good (by Chinese standards) working conditions. If thousands of people are lining up for a job at a Foxconn factory, that means there is absolutely no reason for Foxconn factories ever to employ children; they can find adults to do the job. If thousands of people are lining up for a job at a Foxconn factory, there should be no reason why they should need people to work more than 60 hours per week, in violation of Apple's Code of Conduct; they should be able to find other staff to cover those shifts, and spread the wages around. There is just no reason why it would be bad for Apple to do more to ensure that workers are not abused in its suppliers' factories, that safety measures with regard to toxic or inflammable materials are strictly enforced, and so forth. There is no reason why Apple should not stand up for the rights of workers at its suppliers' plants who have organised not to be fired. This is not some kind of crazy activist demand; it's just what Apple codifies in its own Supplier Code of Conduct, which states that its suppliers must "uphold the human rights of workers, and treat them with dignity and respect as understood by the international community":


Mike Daisey told a bunch of lies about his trip to Shenzhen. But as Apple itself states, and as the New York Times' Charles Duhigg and David Barboza confirm, its suppliers do repeatedly employ children, violate safety codes, and retaliate against workers who try to exercise their right to organise. Codes of conduct don't enforce themselves. What on earth is wrong with pushing Apple to try and make life better for the people who make iPads?