The best article I’ve read this very young new year is “How U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work,” an excellent New York Times piece by Charles Duhigg and Keith Bradsher. It follows up on the question that President Obama famously asked Steve Jobs early last year during a pow-wow with Silicon Valley industry leaders: What can we do to have Apple products manufactured in America again? With his typical bluntness, Jobs told Obama it wasn’t going to happen. One reason is that contemporary America lacks a critical mass of mid-level engineers. But even if we reversed that situation, a larger problem looms: China, with its Foxconn complex, will sacrifice the health and well-being of its workers, treat them like so many indentured servants, in order to fulfill the every whim of tech titans. At any rate, it gives lie to the election-year assertion that all we have to do is loosen regulations and jobs will flood our shores. An excerpt:

“Apple executives say that going overseas, at this point, is their only option. One former executive described how the company relied upon a Chinese factory to revamp iPhone manufacturing just weeks before the device was due on shelves. Apple had redesigned the iPhone’s screen at the last minute, forcing an assembly line overhaul. New screens began arriving at the plant near midnight.

A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day.

‘The speed and flexibility is breathtaking,’ the executive said. ‘There’s no American plant that can match that.'”