Since HP never adopted any moral high ground, and sold their products for cheap, everyone expected their practices to be as slimy as needed to compete. Apple tried to set itself apart and so invited scrutiny, much the same way Victoria's Secret did with their fair trade BS.
Seems your are off on a wild goose chase- the evolution of outsourcing to china for electronics did not start there but in Hong Kong many years ago. Labor was cheap , English was used in the management circles and they had a good level of education, manufacturing and scientific knowledge. They as most other outsourcing countries had minimal environmental protections and lower standards for workers. Taiwan became a force in the 80s and 90s with their engineering expertise and their innovation methods for efficiency that often could be competitive with the emerging low labor rate countries. Taiwan is still one of the most efficient countries in the world in manufacturing even at the higher labor rates. Later it was the Philippines with a 90cent per hour labor rate compared to $2.30 in Hong Kong in the early 90s.. Electonics and Semiconductors were added in Malaysia and other locations and then things went to India and China with 30 cents per hour rates in the early 90s... but both faced a major issue of not being able to handle the technologies and that took many years of training and education from the west and Taiwan to get them to be competitive with both the Philippines and Taiwan. Taiwan was the first country to move into China and create technology centers for manufacturing and was successful in creating a base for building computers and other electronics by using their own engineering expertise while China learning how to handle moving from Rice to Semiconductors...
Today - many of the companies in Hi-tech in China are owned by Taiwan companies and others are state owned or private (to a point)...
Environmental controls are still lax in most offshore manufacturing locations and labor practices are well below what we would allow in the USA... but that does not mean that they have sweat labor nor does it mean that the rank and file workers are being abused.
Consider this scenario which is Foxcon and many other companies in china. The workers are given a living wage (70 cents per hour - over 100% increase in 15 years)far and above what they could make in the fields, they get 2-3 meals a day, they often get lodging and they have enough money to send some home to their families. They can choose to work in a factory or not - they are not indentured and have a choice...
... sure at some point they will have unions or something similar and then the work will find its way to another country that welcomes it...
This is how it has been and how it will be... Over time our products will cost more as the labor costs will increase and the standards will improve.. I have been part of this conversion many times in my past and while it seems unfair when looking from the outside - as long a the companies honor proper labor standards within their country-- it is fair...
Having said that- I do wish we had more manufacturing here in the USA but the costs are often just too high to make it profitable - especially when that manufacturing is manual labor as is the case in many of these factories...
Just something to think about...
