In 2010, 18 employees making iPhones and iPads at the Foxconn factory in China attempted suicide. Much was made of this in the media at the time -- although few people paid attention to the fact that Taiwanese- based Foxconn, the largest private sector company in China, also works for Microsoft, IBM, Samsung, Amazon, HP, Dell and Sony. Nevertheless, with the focus on Apple, Steve Jobs gamely insisted that the factory, with swimming pools and cinemas, was far better than required. The Foxconn communications director Liu Kun, argued that with more than a million employees in China alone, the rate of "self-killing" wasn't far from China's relatively high average. Everyone pledged to do better and the story went away. Well, not quite away. A team of courageous researchers, Students and Scholars against Corporate Misbehavior (SACOM), pursued the story. Working as a team to protect themselves and their interviewees, Jenny Chan and her colleagues interviewed Tian Yu, a 17-year-old-girl who had attempted suicide after her first month at Foxconn. She survived but suffered multiple spinal and hip fractures and was left paralyzed from the waist down. Her story, now published in the academic journal New Technology, Work and Employment, sheds an extraordinary light on the process that feeds us new gadgets every day.

How do you view this ethical issue from the perspective of employee-employer relations ethics?