Conscientious consumers have a lot on their plates these days, and being a music lover doesn’t make it any easier. With the viability of our beloved vinyl format back on the rise here in the age of unintended consequences, we’re faced with some pretty heavy choices. Environmentally, PVC (polyvinyl chloride, aka “vinyl”) is a friggin’ disaster, worse than the abundant waste of compact discs, and worse than the e-waste related to mp3s (although there’s nothing wrong with buying vinyl used—in fact, it’s practically a good deed, keeping the poison-loaded plastic away from incinerators and landfills). Be that as it may, there are still other factors to consider before throwing one’s weight behind a single set of products, as there are more than inanimate vats of chemicals, gaping landfills, and caustic smokestacks buttressing the equation, after all. There are people, folks, ladies and gentlemen, chicks and dudes, at both the start and the finish of these products; people putting these things together, taking them apart, mining for the raw materials and then melting down trash to reclaim the valuable bits when we’re done. There are also the people making a buck at every stage of the game, but who, how, and what they do with the buck once they’ve got it—these are the questions of the hour.

The only clear part of the answer is that barely a fraction of a cent of that buck winds up in the calloused hands doing the toughest, dirtiest, most dangerous and repetitive work, often against their will. We essentially take for granted that no human part of an electronics assembly line will ever be paid or treated well at all, but as long as we’re weighing our options in terms beyond fidelity, convenience, or even the carbon footprint, it’s worth asking: Of the available music formats, which one screws its workers the worst? How do our choices in the music marketplace affect the people behind the products?

By market share alone, Apple is a safe example of industry norms within the mp3 music arena. They’re not the only makers of mp3 players, nor are they by any means the most transparent, and yet despite their veil of secrecy and opaque, generic statements to the press, Apple has been dogged by the specter of sweatshops since light was first cast into its manufacturing darkness by British periodical The Mail on Sunday in June 2006. The article revealed that one of Apple’s key suppliers of dirt-cheap overseas labor, a Taiwanese contract manufacturer called Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., alternately known as Foxconn Electronics, Inc., crams its workers into sub-par, strictly guarded, single-sex dormitories where visitors are prohibited. “They sleep 100 to a room, toil for 15 hours a day, and are paid just £27 [roughly $50] month” in the Shenzhen, China factory, the article alleged. It quoted workers describing how the company required excessive and underpaid overtime and occasional rooftop sessions of harsh “professional education,” involving physically and psychologically oppressive military-style drills of standing completely still in scorching hot weather for up to three hours at a time, under threat of punishment. In response to these allegations and the media pressure that followed, Apple performed its own audit of Foxconn and issued its own report on August 17, 2006, which did acknowledge some code-of-conduct violations, but disputed some of the article’s claims. Apple’s report was not independently verified, however, and did little to satisfy critics. Immediately after that report was published, Janek Kuczkiewicz, director of human and trade union rights at the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU), told the BBC, “We have serious reservations about the report,” and pointed out that Apple interviewed just 100 people out of the estimated 30,000 workers there working on iPods, and that the conditions under which the interviews were held also remained unclear.

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