Tim Cook at a factory in Zhengzhou (cnn.com via Apple)

Foxconn decided to close down one of its factories in central China this morning after a riot took place in the factory compound late Sunday night, according to the New York Times. The plant in the city of Taiyuan employs about 79,000 workers and the brawl involved 2,000 of those employees. Reuters spoke to a Taiyuan plant worker who said that the factory is one of the plants assembles and makes parts for Apple's iPhone 5.

No workers died in the riots, but three were put in critical care.

Pictures of the incident were shared on a Chinese Twitter clone and show that windows in the plant were smashed and that Chinese riot police were called to the scene.

This riot comes three months after a 23-year-old employee committed suicide a month after he started working at the plant. Back in March of this year, Apple promised to improve conditions at Foxconn factories. The announcement came after the Fair Labor Association found a slew of violations at Foxconn factories including ones related to working hours, compensation and health and safety.

Both the Times and Reuters emphasize that this event represents a shift in the attitude of Chinese workers, highlighting the frustration Foxcon employees feel with factory conditions. Both quote Geoff Crothall, a spokesman for a Chinese labor group, who says, “They’re more willing to stand up for their rights, to stand up to injustice” and "Clearly there is deep-seated frustration and anger among the employees and no outlet, apart from violence, for that frustration to be released."

Whatever it was, Apple is now blessing and participating in the Fair Labor Association's "unprecedented" inspection of Foxconn, the Chinese manufacturer whose negligence towards human rights has been opened to the world in recent months.

Apple released an announcement today explaining that the Fair Labor Association will be conducting an independent audit that is "unprecedented in size and scale" in the electronics industry. As part of it, they contend that they'll be interviewing thousands of Foxconn employees, and that the FLA will be taking the "unusual" step of identifying the individual factories audited in their report.

Apple also noted that their suppliers will be fully participating with the audit, that the results will begin to show up in March, and that inspections following Foxconn will include Quanta and Pegatron—two other suppliers—which will eventually cover ninety percent of their manufacturers.

Interestingly, the release strikes a slightly defensive note:

Apple has audited every final assembly factory in its supply chain each year since 2006, including more than 40 audits of Foxconn manufacturing and final assembly facilities. Details of Apple’s supplier responsibility program, including the results of more than 500 factory audits led by Apple throughout its supply chain over the past five years, are available at www.apple.com/supplierresponsibility.

It reads like a defection of blame, kind of like an "at least we tried" clause. Whether or not these audits' good intentions will be carried out dutifully—with the required amount of intense, microscopic scrutiny—it's hard to say: Wired once sent an investigative reporter out to Foxconn, and the company put on a blitzkrieg-style PR campaign to obfuscate the truth of working conditions at the city-sized manufacturer: backbreaking, dehumanizing, and generally miserable. They could do the same here.

At the urging of their biggest business partner, the opposite could also happen.

Mike Daisey—the monologuist who personally investigated Foxconn and reported his depressing findings in his one-man show at New York City's Public Theater, efforts that trumped most actual reporters' looks into the company at that point—wrote today about the announcement on his blog, explaining:

We will have to see how those reports turn out, but this is a welcome change from their position that they were simply furious—they are instead starting the process of stepping up, and this is a testament to so many who have made their voices heard.

He's right. If this results in Apple deciding their profit margins are high enough to sacrifice a sliver in order to make life better for the people making their products—and to ease the first-world guilt of those buying them, of course—or Apple throwing the costs of betting working conditions on their customers: Nobody knows. If anything, it's most certainly an interesting development, and far less a big day for Apple than those who worked to report on the conditions under which their products are made.

Hopefully, it's an even bigger day for those who spend their lives making them.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

The man and his muse

So what does the Apple fan's Apple fan—the New York Times's own David Pogue, the (somewhat controversial) most widely-read technology columnist in the country—have to say about Apple's relationship to Foxconn? Especially given the front page of today's Times, do these sorts of revelations about their manufacturing processes change the way he feels and/or writes about Apple?

We've reached out to David Pogue for comment with those questions. He did not respond, though he did forward our request to New York Times technology editor Damon Darlin, who responded by assuring us over email that "you’ll never get anyone to talk to you if you approach it like that." On Mr. Darlin's insistence, we rephrased the question, and have yet to hear back.

For the moment, it doesn't look likely.

A search for "Foxconn" turns up nothing on his blog. Searches for David Pogue and mentions of the Chinese manufacturer turn up nothing, either.

Mike Daisey—the critically-lauded monologist whose one-man show about these very problems with Apple, The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, which played at New York's Public Theater to critical acclaim last year—actually singled out David Pogue for failing to investigate Apple's practices.

In an interview with The Daily Beast, Mr. Daisey, whose show ran for a number of weeks, and who actually ran an Op-Ed in the Times, was shocked at Mr. Pogue's silence on his show, let alone Foxconn, who he covers for the Times and writes users manuals for.

"David Pogue—I'll call him out—hasn't actually been in to see the show. What I know of David Pogue, David Pogue would travel on his hands and knees, over broken glass, to see anything about the Mac or Steve Jobs, but...he hasn't been here."

Full-Disclosure: I own an iPhone. Reading the Times' piece today—like every other piece about Foxconn out there—gave me further pause about what owning an Apple product (or anything containing any of the products Foxconn manufactures) actually means, and whether or not it's time to start looking into alternatives. Especially as their stock price and revenues continue to soar.

But I don't own one of the largest audiences for personal technology writing out there, and I've been openly critical of Apple's practices and culture in the past. Mr. Pogue's reputation as a nearly unwavering fan of the company's is well-established. The question of whether or not it gives him pause presents itself pretty clearly; what his silence says about the state of how we as a culture talk about technology is a far murkier picture.

On the bright side, at least there's a Google result for it, now.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

(foxconn.com)

What exactly John Biggs attempting to clarify with his series on Foxconn, currently running on TechCrunch? Like so many pieces of tech journalism about the giant corporation which manufactures the shiny devices we hold so dear, it seems first and foremost to be an apologist for the terrible conditions in which these products are produced.Mr. Biggs points out that FoxConn's big problem its image in the West. He notes the work of Students and Scholars Against Corporate Misbehavior, which, through interviews and plant investigations, found the workers are often made to stand for ten hours during work shifts, six days a week, and even longer during run-ups to large shipments.

Mr. Biggs refers to these reports as "inflammatory," "paternalistic," "propaganda," noting that while he would never want to work under those conditions, many poor Chinese must, since they are after all, working there. What he doesn't bother to do is talk with any workers himself, at least for the first three parts of his four part series.

The investigation here amounts to little more than a guided tour. For anyone who has seen the work of Mike Daisey, the playwright behind the Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, who managed to talk with workers, underground labor activists, and, while masquerading as a Western businessman, the factory owners themselves; this is a painful reminder that the American tech press, firmly in the thrall of Apple, has little interest in highlighting the grim realities of how are smartphones are made.

Unless you are prepared to discuss child labor and the crippling effects the human assembly line at FoxConn has on workers bodies', as Mr. Daisey does, you are doing the public a disservice by offering up a shallow "investigation" of FoxConn.