Bring up the subject of the world’s biggest, most unscrupulous tech companies, and many people will mention the low level of corporation tax paid by online behemoths in the UK (just slashed from 20% to 18% by 2020 in George Osborne’s budget). Or they’ll talk about how Amazon is squeezing independent bookshops and paying self-published authors a pittance – as little as $0.006 per page read. Perhaps there will be handwringing over the state of Foxconn, the biggest supplier of Apple products. In Foxconn factories in China, workers average around 55 hours a week, and conditions are so poor that in 2010 alone 14 workers killed themselves.
