At a Catcher Technology Co manufacturing complex in the Chinese industrial city of Suqian, about six hours’ drive from Shanghai, workers stand for up to 10 hours a day in hot workshops slicing and blasting iPhone casings for Apple Inc, handling noxious chemicals sometimes without proper gloves or masks. 

These conditions – some described in a report Jan 16 by advocacy group China Labor Watch and others in Bloomberg News interviews with Catcher workers – show the downside of a high-tech boom buoying the world’s second-largest economy. Chinese recruiters play up the chance to build advanced consumer electronics to attract the millions of typically impoverished, uneducated labourers without whom the production of iPhones and other digital gadgets would be impossible.