You're right, and the moral of that story is: Poverty sucks! Poverty is so bad that even the process of rapidly growing out of that poverty seems incomprehensib

You're right, and the moral of that story is: Poverty sucks! Poverty is so bad that even the process of rapidly growing out of that poverty seems incomprehensibly awful to the non-poor. On the other hand, just because these little letters of protest can't magically fix the whole Chinese economy doesn't mean they're necessarily useless. Worker rights are not won all at once. They're negotiated a little bit at a time. The more bad PR companies get, the higher the cost of dealing with it, and the easier it becomes for workers to negotiate better working conditions. Much of Foxconn's response to this dustup will be cosmetic. But cosmetics cost money, too, so some of the response will consist of real reform.