Have an iPhone, iPod, iPad or any products from Sony, Nintendo, Nokia, Amazon, Microsoft, or Hewlett Packard? There’s a good chance that it came from a Foxconn factory in Southern China.

It’s no secret that working conditions in Chinese factories are not good, but just how bad are they? In the past year, ten Foxconn employees have committed suicide. The latest one, a 19 year old man, jumped from the building after completing his shift.

Most workers at Foxconn are between 18 and 25 and left their parents’ farms in rural China to search for work. They often toil from 4am until late at night, for very little pay (around $150/month), sometimes standing for hours on end.

Before jumping to his death, one young man, accused of loosing one of 16 prototypes that he was responsible for mailing, told his friends that he had been beaten and humiliated by Foxconn security guards.

Foxconn brought in psychologists and Buddhist monks to council workers, as well as punching bags with pictures of supervisors for employees to hit.

While the manufacturer is often criticized by human rights groups, they say that their suicide rate is no higher than average in China. Sad as it is, even the human rights groups admit that it’s far from the worst place to work as far as Chinese factories go.

Apple and several other companies who contract with them have said that they are looking into the issue to make sure that workers are treated fairly. The problem is that what we think of as “fair treatment” differs greatly from the definition of “fair“ in manufacturing regions overseas .

Workers in these factories pay dearly for us to buy more affordable products, but who's to blame? The companies who outsource? Supervisors at the factories? Our government? Theirs? All of us? Tell us what you think.

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Images via CrunchGear and The Economist