Apple may be the most successful corporation of all time. It recently reported a quarterly profit of $18 billion, the largest in history. Its record for technological innovation is unchallenged. It is the most admired brand in the world, according to the 2015 Interbrand Best Global Brands report. And its recent market-capital valuation at $765 billion (before dropping a bit) is the highest ever for any US company. Certainly, Jobs’s vision and Apple engineers’ execution made this possible. But two other factors have contributed mightily to Apple’s success: the unconscionable exploitation of the people who manufacture its products, and the company’s refusal to contribute even a fraction of its fair share in taxes.

We have known for years about the inhumane conditions under which Apple’s subcontractors in China and elsewhere are forced to work. Human-rights and labor-rights groups have addressed them, to be sure, but the issue didn’t gain traction in the mainstream media until 2011, when the performance artist Mike Daisey brought them to light in an amazing one-man show at the Public Theater in New York. Daisey­ was later proved to have played fast and loose with his facts, but The New York Times followed up in January 2012 with a multi-part investigation that demonstrated the larger truth of his charges. Apple was forced to respond and made a series of promises to improve. But many of these promises have been repeatedly broken or simply ignored. In December 2014, the BBC documentary series Panorama secretly filmed inside a number of Chinese facilities where employees of Pegatron and Foxconn were assembling the newest iPhones. As the documentary noted: “The team found Apple’s promises to protect workers were routinely broken. It found standards on workers’ hours, ID cards, dormitories, work meetings and juvenile workers were being breached.” The filmmakers also found tin from illegal digs in Indonesia in the phones, as well as children working in dangerous open-cast mines.