Two things in the first few paragraphs of this Wired article on Apple's Chinese factories are worth complaining about:
According to the report (paraphrased here by Macworld UK), Foxconn's giant Longhua plant employs 200,000 workers, who work 15-hour days but are paid just $50 a month -- miserable even by China's standards.
Printing hourly wage numbers like this is nearly meaningless. Kahney does better than most -- he at least assures us that $50 a month is miserable -- but this number is clearly designed to provoke surprise. The problem: I have no idea what the actual value of $50 is in China. Do you? Leahy seems to be asking me to judge the merits of that wage based on my own experiences with the cost of living in the United States. That's retarded. This ranks alongside chain emails that wax nostalgic about the price of something-or-other in the good old days without taking inflation into account. What do these people think money is?
Workers at [other] factories earn more -- about $100 a month -- but are not housed by the company. The paper says rent and living costs eat up about half the worker's salaries."
This is another failure of context. I think I'm supposed to be appalled at the low standards in developing nations, but simple math and a few minutes of apartment hunting will reveal that the minimum wage in the United States won't get you as far as covering half of your rent and living costs. (This doesn't, of course, have any bearing on the Goodness/Badness of the typical Chinese work environment; I'm merely pointing out that I think Kahney's words fail to have the intended effect.)