This article, IMHO, is written by someone who has no idea how things work just about anywhere that's not the industrialized West, and is shocked and appalled that things aren't as awesome as they are in the US of A.

It's a also a reminder for those of us who live in such ridiculous comfort and freedom that it can get much, much worse.

That being said, I think this article is sensationalist tripe:

> "The idea that ‘without sweatshops workers would starve to death' is a lie that corporate bosses use to cover their guilt."

Okay, my mother worked as a child sweatshop laborer in Taiwan in the 60s, before the country bootstrapped itself out of abject, agrarian poverty, and I take issue with this. It's a straw man; her family was extremely poor, but not in danger of starvation. Without sweatshop labor she wouldn't have starved to death, but she also wouldn't have been able to go to school, get educated, get employed in a white collar job, and eventually move abroad.

Anecdotes do not data make, but knee-jerk emotional reactions and weasel words don't help anyone.

> "To "shower," workers fetch hot water in a small plastic bucket to take a sponge bath."

I hope the author realizes this is common in Asia. Hell, that's how I grew up - showers were somewhat foreign and scary when I first encountered them. Surely there are more convincing indictments about the evils of this workplace.

> "We (who?) would respect us? We are ordered around and told what to do and what not to do. No one in management has ever asked us about anything. There is no discussion. You feel no respect."

This is why I can't take this article seriously - this is also how factories work in the West, where labor laws are followed and abuses minimal. Do we seriously expect factories to be a creative, communal endeavor where management talks everything over with line workers? This isn't office work.

Privileged white collars shocked and dismayed that blue collar work can really, really suck. News at 11.

Looking at the pictures in the article, this place looks no different than a million other factories in any other developing country. In fact, the conditions look downright sanitary, which isn't always the case. To me this isn't much more than another comfortable Westerner shocked and appalled that conditions are so much worse everywhere else in the world. Hi, welcome to reality.

> "While working, the young people cannot talk, use their cell phones or listen to music."

... and this is different than other factories how? Even in the West this is basically the case. What, do you think a production line is happy happy fun times where workers chat on a bluetooth headset with their friends while assembling electronics?

> "Workers need permission to use the bathroom or drink water."

It's an assembly line! How privileged do you have to be to consider walking away to the bathroom randomly at work to be anything but a luxury? Hell, it's a luxury that even in this country many people do not have.

> "Security guards search workers' bags and pockets as they leave the factory."

Same in the USA, especially in warehousing/supply chain jobs.

The only thing really convincingly bad about this particular workplace that the author has exposed are the long hours, but this is also typical of the country it operates in. Workers are paid for their overtime, and many in fact prefer it - many are doing this only as a means to something else - education, rescuing family from poverty, etc, and overtime means they get there more quickly. I really don't see anything egregiously or especially bad this place compared to any other factory one might come across - and it reads like a hit piece against Microsoft.

"We hear you have money, we'd like it."

Despite what you might think, I'm no Ayn Rand-quoting objectivist ;)

What I do think is that this article makes much ado about nothing - sweatshop labor permitted my parents' generation to pull themselves out of poverty, get educated, and get white collar jobs - in fact my mother and all of her siblings eventually all got white collar, comfortable desk jobs.

What we're looking at is a country in a natural evolutionary state towards wealth - much like the US's tendency to impose democracy on nations with no foundation necessary for its success, it would IMHO be disastrous to attempt to enforce Western standards of work (or hell, enforcing white collar definitions of what is reasonable and fair).

Taiwan has evolved from a cheap-labor, sweatshop labor model to an educated, R&D-centric model. The island has gone from an agrarian backwater to one of the urban jewels of the Pacific. I am glad that this has happened - and yet I'm not convinced it would have gone down that well if well-meaning Western labor activists had their way.

I do think that fundamental worker safety must be ensured - companies certainly have proven that they can't be trusted to do that on their own, but enforcing someone's "right" to use a cell phone while working? Really?

My mother-in-law worked in a factory in Taiwan in the 1960s. They didn't believe in providing ear protection to their workers and the loud machinery caused her permanent hearing loss in both ears that she still suffers from to this day. She can only hear out of one ear with a hearing aid, and her family has to shout at her just to barely communicate.

Apparently you have no idea how bad it really is there. Here in the US we went through the industrial revolution in the 1800s, when they used to have child labor in factories, letting thousands of children get harmed or injured by unsafe machinery, sending children on suicide missions into mine shafts, chimneys, etc.

We learned over a hundred years ago that those labor practices are barbaric and unnecessary to provide a healthy economic condition for our country.

Why shouldn't we expect the countries we purchase products from to treat their workers with a modicum of respect and humanity?

I don't condone conditions like this, but everyone should be able to put this in the context of the general standard of living in China. I've been to dorms in Chinese Universities and they don't look much different from the dorms these workers live in.

The average income per person is $6,600, but still 10% of China's population, mostly rural people, live on less than $1 a day. (There are some very rich people in the cities bringing the mean up) The people working in these factories are mostly rural youth, not well educated, doing the best to provide for their families and earn more than what they can doing small scale farming.

I'm not convinced that how our western eyes view things is the same as how locals view this. Even taking home $.50 an hour like the article says means $2000 a year. If you used to be making a dollar a day, this factory job is much better than a dead end job as a farmer. Just keep that in mind.