In an email reportedly sent to Apple's 60,000 or so employees, Tim Cook, the company's chief executive said that Apple "cares about every worker in its supply chain". The letter appears to be in response to a series of articles in the New York Times cataloguing the company's problems in China and divisions within Apple about how to handle the issues.

Apple Inc. agreed to let outside monitors into factories of partners, such as Foxconn Technology Group, and listed suppliers for the first time to counter criticism about conditions of workers making its gadgets.

Over the past decade or more, watchdogs of corporate activity, governments, business leaders and non-governmental organizations have all struggled with how best to deal with human rights abuses caused by business activities. One response has been the Corporate and Social Responsibility (CSR) movement. A plethora of CSR actors now exist: with a wide array of codes of conduct, multi-stakeholder initiatives, and labelling schemes. And although the CSR movement has made many positive contributions, it is now at a turning point.

Just like China’s massive foreign debt holdings, China’s workers’ movement is an economic reality that is now too big to ignore. What China’s 800 million workers want and what they get will impact not only on the cost of consumer products in the West but on the development of the market for international products and services in China. It could also, in the long run, affect the development of workers’ rights globally.

Workers sewing the adidas All Blacks jerseys are paid less than $100 a week - yet each jersey is sold for a recommended $220 in New Zealand. The jerseys are made by the Bowker Yee Sing Garment Factory (He Yuan) Co Ltd, in the city of Heyuan in Guangzhou Province. The 14,100sq m factory employs 2400 staff, half of whom sleep in dormitories.

A deadly explosion at a Chinese factory making iPads for Apple has focused attention on lax industrial safety standards that continue to plague many Chinese workers, while raising supply chain risks in the high-end electronics sector.

Apple found more than 91 children working at its suppliers last year, nine times as many as the previous year, according to its annual report on its manufacturers. The US company has also acknowledged for the first time that 137 workers were poisoned at a Chinese firm making its products and said less than a third of the facilities it audited were complying with its code on working hours.

Concerned about rebalancing of the world economy? Then set aside the G-20 and all the complicated wrangling over exchange rates and ponder instead the story of a one-handed former Chinese factory worker.

Google Inc.'s challenge to Beijing is not a first: Levi Strauss & Co. 17 years ago walked away from China. Today, Levi's brand jeans are produced in China, and in Beijing last November the company opened its 501st store in the country. What happened in between?

The American retail giant Wal Mart has run into trouble in China again, after some of its suppliers were accused of serious abuses against their workers.