Yesterday, Australia’s Herald Sun ran a story announcing that an “iPad generation of children and teenagers” is at risk of repetitive strain injuries to thumbs, according to chiropractors.

Just a few days before, the New York Times reported an explosion at an iPad factory in southwest China that killed two people and injured a dozen more.

People are dying so we may have the privilege of playing “Words with Friends” until our thumbs are exhausted. What a wonderful world.

For decades, Apple has kept information about its manufacturing process far from the reach of public hands. It’s been acknowledged that the company outsources massive amounts of jobs to China, but few outsiders have actually stepped foot in those factories for a glimpse of working conditions.

In a recent episode of NPR’s “This American Life,” host Mike Daisey visited an Apple factory in Shenzhen, China, with 34,000 workers, many of whom were mere teenagers. One worker died at the factory after clocking in a 34-hour shift.

While deaths are not the daily norm, brutal labor environments are. According to the New York Times, excessive overtime, crowded spaces and swollen joints from long periods of standing are part of the job description. Just two years ago, 137 workers at a factory in eastern China were injured after being ordered to use a toxic chemical to clean iPhone screens.

Reports of these conditions come as a shock to many of us who have remained loyal to Apple products since our iPod Mini days. It clashes with the wholesome corporation’s image, best upheld by Steve Jobs himself.

When his self-titled biography became a best-seller and shrines were erected across the globe following his death last October, it became abundantly clear that much of the world had fallen for more than just the Apple CEO’s vision: they loved him, too.

“When I hire somebody really senior, competence is the ante,” Jobs once said. “They have to be really smart. But the real issue for me is, are they going to fall in love with Apple? Because if they fall in love with Apple, everything else will take care of itself. They’ll want to do what’s best for Apple, not what’s best for them, what’s best for Steve, or anybody else.”

Apple executives have known about the exploitation of workers in their factories, but say their desire to improve working conditions conflicts with supplier relationships and fast production. According to the New York Times, this past quarter was Apple’s most lucrative yet, with $13.06 billion in profits on $46.3 billion in sales – a number that could have been even higher, executives said, if overseas factories had been able to produce more.

Though it’s the goal of every corporation to make the most money possible, Apple seemed to stand primarily for quality. Doing “what’s best for Apple,” consumers were led to think, certainly meant the use of non-toxic cleaners and eight-hour shifts. Doing “what’s best for Apple,” we thought, meant preserving life in a number of ways: Both for the Apple consumers – who store their photos and documents on their devices – and, in a more literal sense, for the people who manufacture them.

Over the weekend, I heard Suzanne Rosenblatt speak in Milwaukee. She’s been performing her poem “Government of the Corp, By the Corp, For the Corp” for years, but its last line is particularly resonant concerning Apple and similar problems.

“Blame the corps, the corps, the corporations, the greedy rogues with the bottom line,” she says, “who ignore the corpse, the corpse, the corpses left behind.”