While Apple Is Criticized for Foxconn, Other Companies Are Silent

"While Media Single Out Apple for Foxconn, Companies See No Reason to Bring Attention to Themselves".

How is this surprising? Maybe the NYT should look inwards and cover Foxconn as a general problem, not something endemic to Apple.

$575 profit per iPhone? I think you mixed up profit with something else, maybe average sale price.

In a free market, profit isn't determined by cost or your intuition about "fairness". Price is determined by supply and demand, and profit is price minus cost.

Foxxconn already pays well above average wages while providing a safer workplace than the average US manufacturer, and a lower suicide rate than the Chinese average. And this is still going up even as working hours decrease.

Whether all these criticisms are completely legitimate or not (for example I think workers should be allowed to work more overtime if they voluntarily choose to, to get more money, instead of being capped at 49hours/week), Apple is responding to them as well as anyone could ask for.

Apple's competitors are not getting the same scrutiny. Since Apple is handling the issue great, isn't there room for some of that attention to land on others with much worse practices?

Further, Apple has nowhere near 80% of the production or employees or anything like that. There are other big players as far as how many Chinese workers they are involved with, which I think is the relevant metric for how important reform is.

That $575 number is nonsensical; the iPhone 4S (the most expensive model) costs $599 off-contract. These phones do not cost $25 to make. The real number is somewhere around $300, most of which paid by the carrier: http://www.asymco.com/2012/02/26/iphone-sine-qua-non/.

Regardless, doubling the pay for workers does not solve the real issue here. Their wages are already above average for Chinese factory workers in that area. If you want these workers to be paid a first-world wage, that's a much larger issue than how much Apple pays their final assembly workers.

Also, Foxconn does not build just phones. It's used by most desktop and laptop manufacturers, where Apple is certainly not in the lead, and to assemble all game consoles, where Apple doesn't even have products. Microsoft, for example, is responsible for the workers in the incident mentioned here: http://kotaku.com/5874706/report-mass-suicide-threats-at-xbo... (I don't think Microsoft would have an issue paying more, for example.)

Now this is not to underplay the problems in Chinese manufacturing, of which there are many. But Apple is certainly not singularly able to make any changes here.

>> [Foxconn provides] a safer workplace than the average US manufacturer

Would really love to see some data that backs up that assertion.

Did anyone notice the text under the image "A worker inspected motherboards on a factory line at the Foxconn plant in Shenzen, China, in May."

She is looking at a graphics cards, not a motherboard.