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Before you buy the iPhone 5, read this undercover report on how it's made

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Foxconn production line

Later today, Tim Cook will strut on stage and unveil Steve Jobs' last hurrah, the iPhone 5. Hardware specs aside, it will undoubtedly be a marvel of exemplary design and engineering. Before you invest in Apple's latest masterpiece, though, you should read a story that bubbled onto the internet last night — a damning exposé (or insightful report, depending on your point of view) on how the iPhone 5 is made.

Update: Apple has now officially unveiled the iPhone 5.

The story, published by the Shanghai Evening Post and translated by M.I.C. Gadget, is the account of an undercover journalist who infiltrated Foxconn's Taiyuan factory with the purpose of finding out how the new iPhone 5 is produced. Located in China's northern province of Shanxi, just west of Beijing, Foxconn's Taiyuan factory is reportedly responsible for making 85% of all iPhone 5s. The Taiyuan factory isn't on the same kind of scale as Foxconn City in Shenzen, where some 500,000 employees work, eat, and sleep in a walled community, but it's still a very large production line with tens of thousands of workers solely working on the iPhone 5.

The original story, as it appeared in the Shanghai Evening Post To get a job at Foxconn, the Chinese journalist simply rolled up at the factory, where it isn't unusual for hundreds of potential recruits to be waiting outside, hoping to be picked. The journalist was asked to fill in a form of 30 yes/no answers to ascertain his mental health (one question asked "Have you got into a state of mental trance recently?"), and upon passing that test he was asked to sign a contract. The main purpose of the contract is to ensure confidentiality — trade secrets, salaries — but it also includes a waiver, where the journalist had to waive his rights to a clean, safe, and quiet work environment. Not a good start.

The new Foxconn employee is then put through an intensive 7-day training program, where the main tenet is simply obey. On the production line "there's no advanced technology, you only need to obey instructions," the instructor tells the Chinese journalist. "You might feel uncomfortable of how we treat you, but this is all for your own good."

And then it's time to actually produce some iPhones! To gain access to the production floor, all employees must pass through a metal detector — and if they set off the alarm, they're fired on the spot. The production floor itself is noisy and the air is thick with the smell of plastic. In this case, our hero has found himself on the production line for the iPhone 5 backplate. His job is to pick up a raw, unfinished backplate and mark four drilling points with a pen, in under three seconds. He must do this for 10 hours, without breaks. A fellow worker, sitting opposite the journalist, was exhausted and went to lay down for a while — but he was spotted by the supervisor and commanded to stand and face the corner of the room for 10 minutes.

Unauthenticated

A Foxconn dormitory The journalist also talks of his dormitory, canteen, library, gym, and other facilities, saying that most of them are free to use but in serious need of renovation. The wardrobe in his dormitory was full of cockroaches, and his wood plank bed had a big hole in it. In the entertainment center, two thirds of the arcade machines don't work — and, perhaps most importantly, nowhere on the entire campus sells beer.

Now, even though this diary was published in a reputable newspaper, we don't really have a way of authenticating the details. A lot of the diary's details contradict other reports that we've seen and read from Foxconn over the last few years. Foxconn is certainly a tough place to work — but when is production line work ever easy? In one part of the diary, the journalist says: "I was thinking who on earth wants to work two extra hours overtime for only mere 27 yuan?" — but 27 yuan ($4) for two hours of work is actually quite a good wage in Shanxi. There is also a scene discussing Foxconn's "spate" of suicides — but as we now know, Foxconn's suicide rate is much lower Chinese's national average. I doubt the diary is completely fabricated, but it might have been dramatized a little.

I love Foxconn Ultimately, there's no getting around the fact that millions of Chinese work on production lines like those found in Foxconn. Undoubtedly there are some that are clean and safe, but there are probably hundreds that are dirty and dangerous. If these workers enjoyed the same working conditions and salaries as Americans or Europeans, China wouldn't have become the manufacturing capital of the world. This is just a fact of consumerist, capitalist life.

Now read: What if the iPhone 5 isn't the best phone in the world? and Apple's record profits built on grinding employees into dust – then blowing them up