For the record, I'm a fairly bleeding-heart liberal and former globalisation sceptic. What turned me around was moving to India in 2001-2002. I was working for an architecture & planning firm, and was fairly shocked by the working conditions at the construction sites. Temporary slum-like shantytowns -- totally informal mud-and-corrugated metal shacks -- were set up to house the workers, who worked for 7 days per week, from dawn to dusk. They had one day off per month, at new moon. They had no safety gear whatsoever. Children as young as 5 were at work carrying construction materials around. Food and housing -- such as it was -- were provided for free, but the average take-home pay amounted to three dollars per month.

This wasn't evil Westerners coming in and mercilessly exploiting the natives; this was simply the bog-standard working conditions in every construction site across the country. When I saw that, I realised that the entire Western dialectic about sweatshops ("Michael Jordan earns $40M for endorsing shoes that are made by 12-year-olds earning $1 per day!") was completely irrelevant and corrupt. What I realised is that a classically "awful" sweatshop would be entail a spectacular improvement in both salaries and working conditions, compared to the alternatives. Yes, a sweatshop would still be bad if compared to working conditions in the West, but people in developing countries -- particularly at the time -- didn't have access to working conditions in the West, so that was a meaningless comparison to make. The only legitimate comparison was to the alternatives actually available to them, and seen in that light, a typical Nike sweatshop looked like Nirvana.

Fortunately, India continued to go down the path of globalisation, and I still work there frequently. Western businesses set up shops which "exploited" the native workers by giving them vastly better salaries and working conditions than anything they'd ever had before. Successive waves of these businesses created a climate of tremendous economic mobility, with workers constantly jockeying to jump to each emerging income tier. In just over a decade, I've seen several hundred million people come out of absolutely grinding poverty into a lifestyle which is still poor but not truly deprived; I've seen several hundred million more acquire a standard of living that -- considering the difference in purchasing parity power -- is perfectly in line with first-world norms. This has had a knock-on effect in every sector of the economy, including those where the Western presence isn't particularly felt. When I go to construction sites now, for example, the workers still tend to live in (better) temporary shanty-towns next to the construction sites, but now they have safety gear, their pay has increased about 40-fold, and their children go to school rather than work.

It has been an absolute pleasure to watch this happen. From everything I've seen, the rise of China -- which Foxconn epitomises -- has roughly paralleled this course of development, only more so.

Frankly, the question of "how bad is Foxconn, really?" should have been answerable with a single data point: their suicide rate is lower than that of China's as a whole. That should tell you something. Foxconn is undoubtedly imperfect, but that one fact demonstrates that it must be better than the alternatives. Much of the negative perception of Foxconn has been driven by cultural misunderstanding rather than reality. When sensationalist journalists tried to turn the (statistically lower) rate of suicide into a news story, the instincts of Foxconn managers were to save face, act humble, and vow to do better. That's how you gain respect in Confucian culture, but to Americans it looked like an admission of guilt. It would have been better if their PR department had foregone the absurd suicide nets and such, and simply said "Look, our suicide rate is lower than the rest of China's, so take that, biatches!"

That would have gotten the truth across more succinctly than anything else.