Following a report in the New York Times last month, there have been numerous reports, in the Times itself as well as on CNN and in UK's Observer of unsafe working conditions and worker abuses in various plants producing Apple products in China. During one particularly harrowing incident last May, two people were killed and over a dozen others hurt when the accumulation of aluminum dust inside a plant at Chengdu led to a massive explosion. Apple's new iPad had gone on sale just weeks earlier, and workers were told that thousands of iPad cases needed to be polished each day. As a result of the frantic atmosphere inside the factory, large amounts of aluminum dust were allowed to accumulate simply because the plant's overworked air duct system could not keep up with the rate at which polishing lines were operating. Seven months after that blast, another such explosion occurred in Shanghai, once again aluminum dust being the cause.

  In addition to reports of such safety concerns, such as those involving the use of poisonous chemicals to clean iPhone screens, there have been various reports of worker abuse at Apple plants. Some employees report being forced to work excessive overtime, in some cases over 60 hours a week for meager wages, while they live in crowded dorm rooms and have to stand so long each day that their legs begin to swell and they can hardly walk. Consequently, there have been incidences of suicides by workers who were seemingly having difficulty dealing with the claustrophobic, Spartan lives they were forced to live as Apple employees. Recently, on CNN, a distraught young woman who works at one of Apple's plants spoke of how her daily life consisted entirely of sleeping and going to work.

  According to the New York Times article, current and former Apple employees say that the company has made significant strides in improving factories in recent years, and that it in fact has established a supplier code of conduct that details standards on labor issues and safety protections; while at the same time it has mounted a vigorous auditing campaign for the purpose of discovering worker abuses or unsafe practices. Yet the same problems seem to remain. More than half of the suppliers of products in their chain audited by the company have violated at least one code of conduct every year since 2007, according to Apple's own reports. And while many violations involve working conditions, rather than actual safety hazards, troubling patterns remain. "Apple never cared about anything other than increasing product quality and decreasing production cost," says one former management employee at Foxconn Technology, one of Apple's most important manufacturing partners. "Workers' welfare has nothing to do with their interests."  

  Of course, as much as anything, what drives Apple's motivation to cut such corners is people's insatiable need to own and use their products. Just as the public's need to own the latest pair of Air Jordans back in the 1980s and 1990s led to similar abuses of workers at Nike plants in Malaysia, the need by people to immediately possess the latest iPhone or iPad leads inevitably toward an institutional obsession by Apple to turn out these products as fast as possible, and seemingly by any means necessary. Only what their company is selling is something much more addictive, and much more important to increasing numbers of people than simply basketball sneakers. It is the need to avoid looking life fully in the face by dulling one's conscious awareness through the best drug ever invented for that purpose - a plastic screen with virtual images on the other side of it.

  Therefore, whether you want to admit it to yourself or not, if you spend a significant portion of your day staring into the screen of your iPhone or iPad simply because it beats being alone with your own thoughts, and consequently have an instiable need to possess the next product coming down the pike from Apple even after you have heard reports of worker abuses coming from places like China, then you are somehow complicit in the mistreatment of those workers. And no amount of rationalizing is going to spare you that responsibility. Now that we've all become so interconnected in this Internet driven world that we've suddenly entered, we have to accept not only its advantages, but also its inherent responsibilities.

  In fact, as time goes on, and the freshness and excitement of the virtual world we are inhabiting begins to wear off, hopefully people will begin to perceive more clearly how many of them are now caught in a strange Faustian bargain, trading a diluted consciousness and rampant addiction to the latest tech toys (an addiction which is certain to spawn increasing levels of greed on both the consumer and the supplier end of business chains) for the ease of rapid communication and the retrieval of heretofore inaccessible information. As a result, more worker abuses are almost certain to occur simply because, sadly enough, how many people are willing to forego purchasing the latest intriguing product from Apple after hearing of such abuses?

  Consequently, the addiction will become ever stronger over time now that we have a generation of young people who have never known a world without an ever present virtual reality. Therefore, their need for the latest innovative virtual device that they can begin to inhabit will most likely lead to even more mistreatment by workers overseas in not only factories which are part of Apple's supply chain, but also possibly in the supply chains of Dell, Hewlett-Packard, I.B.M., Nokia, Sony, Toshiba, and others. There has always been an insidious relationship between people's ever present need to escape the realities of their lives and their willingness to turn a blind eye toward anything which gets in the way of that. Yet as long as Albert Camus' "The Stranger," Friedrich Nietzsche's "Thus Spoke Zarathustra," and Fyodor Dostoevsky's "Crime and Punishment" sit on the shelves of bookstores and libraries, waiting to be found by younger generations, there is still hope.