Apple really should be setting a good example, and based on recent financial statements has the profit margin to do it.
That said, I'm not entirely sure about these figures; they're claiming a plant that employs 200,000 people working 15 hour days, and implies that's primarily iPods (I say this based on the "iPod city" phrase, though one assumes the plants make other stuff, too).
Now, with Apple selling around 8 million iPods a quarter (some of which are Shuffles, which they said are made at a different plant), that works out to 2.5 million iPods a month, maximum (assuming there are nearly zero shuffles sold, and almost all of the rest are made there), or 115K iPods per workday (assuming a 5-day week). Now, were all 200,000 people building iPods, that would work out to it taking almost two 15-hour person-days to assemble a single iPod.
I could be mistaken here, but based on the takeaparts I've seen, and the fact that these plants are just assembly of parts from elsewhere, I seriously doubt it takes someone 25 hours of work to put a Nano together and box it up, even if absolutely everything was done by hand and not using machinery. Not to mention at $50 a day that would put the labor cost at $85 not including housing.
Obviously it's not costing even a fraction of that to assemble an iPod (the parts ain't that cheap, and there's a rather fat margin on them), so either these numbers are drastically off somewhere, or only a tiny fraction of those workers are building iPods.
I'm not saying that it's not entirely likely Apple is hiring a lowest-common-denominator company to assemble iPods, and I'd argue that at the very least they should be outsourcing to somewhere that's a "good" place to work, at least by local standards, but I'm not jumping to conclusions about an article that at the very least is misrepresenting Apple as having a city of 200,000 underpaid workers living in dorms cranking out iPods for the world.
I'll wait to hear a little more before I make any decisions. Here's a Wired article that notes the contractor is generally considered pretty good by East Asian labor standards, and that the Mail article may be hyperbolic:
http://www.wired.com/news/columns/0,71138-0.html?tw=wn_index_3