Please, all CEO's are "assholes". If you cannot take harsh impersonal decisions, then you do not deserve to be a leader, beta boy.
There was an interesting documentary on Foxcon a while back. I can't remember all the details but they basically made the workers live there. They found it cheaper to just having them working around the clock then having them leave. They were so poor that transportation was a problem. Could they leave? They may have been under contract to stay in the building. These people were for all practical purposes prisoners. Except that prisoners in the US actually are treated far better which tells you a lot. I know a lot of people on this thread are ignoring the Foxcon issue as just a "that's how all third world countries are like" thing but they have no idea. When people compare Foxcon to German concentration camps, they are being dead serious. The conditions are that horrible. And while many CEO's legitimately don't know about the working conditions of factories over seas, Steve Jobs was made acutely aware of the issue on a regular basis by many activists in the Bay Area and yet did nothing about it. I think his only comment was he was going to work with them on reducing the amount of suicides. You know what that meant? They were going to install nets around the premise so when people jumped they wouldn't die, they would be sent back to work.
omg!! Jobs wouldn't allow art about perverted men that like to f$%k each other in their hairy, stinking, as%^oles... He's a bad guy!!
AFAIK, many (maybe most) factories in China provide accommodation etc for their workers. It's part of their compensation. When you hear about workers only receiving a few hundred dollars a month in salary, it's not the whole compensation package. However, your post indicates something different, something like a prison or slave labour camp where the worker is not allowed to leave under any circumstances! My suspicion is the the workers were on lengthy contracts, maybe they had to spend a year at this place. If so, they shouldn't have signed up. It's v difficult to believe that Jobs or any other CEO would have been fine with the concept that their products were being manufactured by slave labour, which is what you are close to inferring.
There was no dark side of Steve Jobs. Sure he might have been a brutal "task master" who had some profane things to say every now and then behind closed doors, but the fact is he employed many thousands of people. He put a lot of food into a lot of mouths. He helped people build lives and careers. Sure, he may have never donated 1 dime to charity, but he created a lot of jobs and fed a lot of mouths...paid for a lot of mortgages. He did more then Buffet ever did by empowering people and making them work for the dime. If you went to work at Apple, then Im certain there wouldnt be any sitting or fooling around like there is over at Facebook or Google. Steve probably makes everyone sweat, but is hard work and being under the gun to meet a deadline such a bad thing. Its called honest work in my book and a experience that everyone should have. Is there a darkside there? Well, I guess if you count how many times Steve said fuck or shit behind closed doors then yeah that might be a darkside, however, beyond that he was a great man.
He's fucked you all over. He is laughing at you all from beyond the grave. Millions of you wasted your hard-earned (or borrowed) cash on his over-priced electronic fashion accessories, which he manufactured for next to nothing in the sweatshops of China. And the funny thing is you all love him for it.
Hmmm, his over priced products are liked by a lot of people though, who were and are still prepared to pay the "over priced" price to own them. And Jobs is dead, so he isn't laughing. When you die, you die, you don't laugh at anybody afterwards.
This may be a little off topic, but the ironic and perhaps sad thing is that some of the things related to his success - his hubris / demand for having things done his own way and believing he always knew best - were probably what killed him. If he'd only listened to the experts from the beginning and had his surgery as soon as he was diagnosed instead of wasting 9 months on alternative methods he more than likely would've been cured of this rare and treatable form of pancreatic cancer. Very unfortunate.