As was customary when making charges against a person or institution, TAL producers invited Apple and Foxconn to respond to Daisey on-air. Both declined. In addition, Glass was looking for other guests who could speak knowledgably about conditions inside Chinese factories. He also wanted to discuss the question raised by Daisey’s monologue: should US consumers feel bad about buying computers and phones made under the conditions he described?

Glass lined up two additional guests for the show: Ian Spaulding, whose company helped Chinese factories meet Western social responsibility standards, and New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, who had chronicled poverty and working conditions in China and developing countries. Spaulding and Kristof would provide additional context and help corroborate Daisey’s findings. Glass also planned to quote from Apple’s audit reports—available on its website—on working conditions at its suppliers worldwide.

When they taped the guests, Spaulding in general agreed with Daisey’s characterization of the Chinese labor situation. “Well, unfortunately, I think some of these conditions sound actually common,” he said. ^[26] But he had one quibble: child labor, while a problem in Chinese factories, was not an issue at top-tier electronics manufacturers such as Foxconn. “Even people who are critical of Foxconn for all kinds of things agreed with this,” Glass confirmed. It was possible, conceded Spaulding, that an underage worker could get a job with Foxconn using a borrowed identification card, but that would be rare. Daisey responded: “Well, I don’t know if it’s a big problem. I just know what I saw.”

Columnist Kristof, for his part, suggested that consumers should not feel guilt about overseas working conditions. Kristof, whose wife’s ancestral village was near Foxconn, said:

If you look at Shenzhen, for example, and Guangdong [the province], where Foxconn is, then there’s no doubt that it has been a tremendous benefit, not only to southern China, but indeed to much of Asia. It created massive employment opportunities, especially for young women, who frankly didn’t have a lot of alternatives. That tended to give women more clout within families, within the community…. For many Chinese, the grimness of factories like Foxconn was better than the grimness of the rice paddies.

In his segment, Daisey responded that he had often heard this argument: that sweatshops were a phase poor countries endured on their way to becoming industrialized. Daisey felt that basic labor standards should be adhered to everywhere. “[I]t’s not right,” he observed.

January 6 airing . The segment was scheduled to air on Friday, January 6, 2012. That evening at 7 p.m., “Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory”  was first broadcast on WBEZ in Chicago. Glass ended the segment by reminding listeners of Daisey’s one-man show at New York’s Public Theater. The show aired on other public radio stations throughout the weekend.