Every so often, the American public gets worked up over conditions inside the factories that make its goods. In the nineteen-nineties, Kathie Lee Gifford came under attack for allegedly manufacturing her clothing line in overseas sweatshops. Brands from Nike to Walmart have been accused at various times of labor abuses. Now factory workers are back in the news because of a theater performer named Mike Daisey. His account of visiting a plant in China where Apple manufactures iPads and iPhones—where he supposedly interviewed workers who were underage or had been poisoned or maimed on the job—was the basis of a one-man show and a popular episode of the public-radio program “This American Life.” It was also a fraud. According to an investigation by Rob Schmitz, the China correspondent for the public-radio program “Marketplace,” Daisey fabricated characters and details to exaggerate the grimness of factory life. The ensuing debate has focussed on journalistic values and the nature of truth. But Daisey’s larger point—that Chinese factories are oppressive, and that our desire for cheap goods makes them so—remains unchallenged. Why invent facts if the reality is bad enough?

Far from being radically innovative, Daisey approached the story of Chinese manufacturing as almost every journalist before him had done. First, find a factory that makes iPhones, or Barbie dolls, or American flags, or Mardi Gras beads—anything to establish a connection with the American reader. Talk to a few workers laboring under conditions that no American could accept. Then write a story that neatly connects reader and subject, in a global supply chain of consumption and guilt. A young woman makes less than a dollar an hour stitching your running shoes. A young man jumps off a factory roof after working overtime to assemble your iPad. The gadgets embody the injustice of the system that created them: What’s wrong with a world in which a worker on an iPhone assembly line can’t even afford to buy one? As “This American Life” host Ira Glass put it at the end of the episode retracting the original Daisey broadcast, “As somebody who owns these products, should I feel bad?”

The simple narrative equating American demand and Chinese suffering is appealing, especially at a time when many Americans feel guilty about their impact on the world. It’s also inaccurate and disrespectful. We must be peculiarly self-obsessed to imagine we have the power to drive tens of millions of people on the other side of the world to migrate and suffer in terrible ways. China produces goods for markets all over the world, including for its own consumers, thanks to low costs, a large and educated workforce, and a flexible manufacturing system that responds rapidly to market demands. To imagine that we have willed this universe into being is simply solipsistic. It is also demeaning to the workers. We are not at the center of this story—we are minor players in theirs. By focussing on ourselves and our gadgets, we have reduced the human beings at the other end to invisibility, as tiny and interchangeable as the parts of a mobile phone.

Chinese workers are not forced into factories because of our insatiable desire for iPods. They choose to leave their farming villages for the city in order to earn money, to learn new skills, to improve themselves, and to see the world. And they are forever changed by the experience. In the latest debate over factory conditions, what’s been missing are the voices of the workers. Here are a few:

Bao Yongxiu: My mother tells me to come home and get married. But if I marry now before I have fully developed myself, I can only marry an ordinary worker. So I’m not in a rush. Chen Ying: When I went home for the new year, everyone said I had changed so much. They asked me, “What did you do that you have changed so much?” I told them that I studied and worked hard. If you tell them more, they won’t understand anyway. Wu Chunming: Even if I make a lot of money, it won’t satisfy me. Just to make money is not enough meaning in life. Xiao Jin: Now after I get off work I study English, because in the future our customers won’t be only Chinese. So we need to learn more languages.

I spent two years getting to know assembly-line workers in the south China factory city of Dongguan while writing a book, “Factory Girls,” about their lives. Certain subjects came up over and over: How much money they made, what their bosses were like, what kinds of husbands they hoped to find, whether they should jump to another factory or stay put. Other things they barely mentioned, such as living conditions that most Americans would see as only a step up from prison life: ten or fifteen workers to a room, fifty people sharing one bathroom, days and nights ruled by the factory clock. Everyone they knew lived in similar circumstances, and it was still better than the school dormitories and village homes of rural China. The workers rarely spoke about the products they manufactured, and they often had difficulty explaining what they did. What a factory made was never the point; what mattered was what they had personally gained there, how they had challenged their boss or gotten a raise or met a best friend or a boyfriend. They could not have cared less who was buying their products.

Journalistic coverage of Chinese factories, in contrast, plays up the relation between workers and their products. Many articles calculate how long a worker would have to labor to buy the item coming off his production line; an entry-level worker on an iPhone assembly line, for example, would have to shell out two and a half months’ wages for one. But how meaningful is this calculation? I recently wrote an article for The New Yorker (about reading habits in China), yet I can’t afford to buy an ad in the magazine. So what? I don’t want an ad in The New Yorker, just as these workers do not necessarily desire iPhones. Their reckonings are different: How much money can I save at this job? How long should I stay? And later: How much do I need to buy an apartment or a car, to get married or put my child through school?