I’ve seen that line repeated again and again, and I simply don’t understand how people can keep saying it.

$17 is just a number. What you need to be looking into is what it actually means in the place where they live. In America, $17 won’t get you very far, since the cost of living is decently high across America. But the spending power of $17 in China is significantly higher.

I know that, fresh out of grad school, I accepted a job offer that was a third lower than other offers I received, partly because I knew that the pay from the company would go a lot further as a result of where they were located. How much more is that true between a developed nation and one that is largely still developing?

China is not the U.S., so you need to scale your considerations appropriately. Though the value of the USD has gone down in recent years, $1 will still go a lot further in China than it will in the U.S.. You should be looking at their pay in terms of its spending power, rather than in terms of its raw numerical value, and in those terms, these people are being paid extraordinarily well for the work they are doing and the skill level required.

I’m sorry to tell you, but you are a pampered first world hypocrite.

All of the workers who assemble iPhones have health care. That is not true of about 1/4 of US workers. The US is the only industrialized country that excludes people from its public medical system. There are 2 estimates of how many people this kills unnecessarily per year (in other words, people who would still be alive if they were Canadians) and those estimates are 26,000 per year and 40,000 per year. That is a lot more deaths than 11 suicides per year at a factory of 400,000, a suicide rate that is lower than the typical US city, which is actually smaller in population than the Foxconn factory.

So while you are taking umbrage at worker treatment at Foxconn factories in China, what are you doing about the worker treatment in the US? Many more are dying and being maimed and crippled because of lack of health care in the US than are dying or being maimed and crippled because they worked at Foxconn. That is an empirical fact. We have so many numbers on both Foxconn and the broken US medical system that it is not funny.

Further, do you know what it’s like to be a Pennsylvania Coal Miner? Go find out. It will shock you to learn that coal miners go a mile into the earth, into a makeshift cavern, with fans to blow the flammable coal dust out so that it doesn’t ignite and burn them all to death — sometimes the fans fail and everybody gets burned to death — and they breathe in way, way too much coal dust, leading to them dying 10 or 20 or more years earlier than everyone else. That is if they don’t get killed in a cave-in first.

Have you seen workers in an Amazon.com warehouse, picking orders? That is a brutal job. If you get pregnant, you are fired. If you miss a day because your wife had a baby, you get fired. You have no health care. You make what may be more in dollars than the workers at Foxconn, but you also have to pay market prices for housing, market prices for food, market prices for everything. The numbers don’t add up. Those workers are doing back-breaking work, and what they get paid barely houses and feeds them.

To be clear, I want to see work conditions improve everywhere, including China, including at Foxconn, including on the Apple lines. But to look down your nose at Foxconn workers like they are the only factory workers in the world who have it bad is just outrageous, and in many cases, it is pure racism. For example, The Liar Mike Daisey portrayed Chines factory workers as gentle, helpless souls, who only want to spend their days writing beautiful Chinese calligraphy, if only some big fat Yank would show up and lead them from oppression. NO. The workers at Foxconn are savvy, self-aware human beings who in many cases are seizing an opportunity to improve their lives and the lives of their families, similar to going away to college. Like many people in the US, they did not have an opportunity to go to college. So like many people in the US, they rolled up their sleeves and they traveled a long way away from their family to work at a brutally hard job for what is always too little money, but at the end of the day, they are producing tiny, low-cost, ultra low-power computers that are being put into the hands of school children and are making the world a better place as they replace giant, power-hungry computers and stacks of paper 20 trees tall. They are investing in the future of China and of the world by doing work that actually NEEDS to be done. They are not bulldozing something or blowing something up or invading something. And they are lifting their families out of poverty and giving them a chance to participate in a growing Chinese middle class. That is in the best tradition of factory workers everywhere. They deserve respect, and they really do not deserve any US Americans looking down on them. If you are American, worry about your undiagnosed stage 4 cancer and your 8th grade literacy and the workers who are being abused right there in your own country.

Not to mention, the US leads the world in jailing people, the majority of which are non-violent and poor. Some just needed medical attention but could not get it, so they self-medicated with a street drug and then got put in jail for 5 years for that. Some were laid off from a factory that got shipped to China, could not get welfare, ended up homeless, self-medicated to get out of that misery, and pretty soon they are in jail for 5 or 10 years, even though they committed no acts of violence, did not threaten anybody. In other industrialized countries, they would have seen a doctor and been given basic public housing and get back on their feet. Here, it is jail. So self-righteousness from US Americans about Chinese worker conditions is just too much. It’s absurd.

And I did not even mention how we treat the farm workers who start way down in Mexico at the beginning of the harvest, and they travel north up into California and Arizona for the later harvest, doing back-breaking work turning fields of plants into actual food that people can eat, and can feed to their children. Over the past 4 years, over 1 million of these workers were imprisoned without charge in the US (not having a work permit is a civil offense, not a criminal offense, it is like an expired drivers license) for months at a time, and then deported to Mexico, left in the middle of nowhere there, far from family, with no money, and they have missed the rest of the harvest. These farm workers have no health care, find it very hard to secure housing because so much paperwork can be required even to rent a basic apartment, and they are constantly abused because if they go to authorities, they may get deported.

What are you doing about the farm workers who picked your food and helped feed your family? There may be a so-called Immigration Jail right in your town, where the person who picked your breakfast is getting raped and beaten right now, before she will be dumped across the border with no money. But your head is in China for some reason.

Spoken like someone who isn’t an Apple stockholder.