The raw materials for your iPhone are mined in atrocious conditions on one continent and assembled by overtired, underpaid and suicide-prone factory workers on another. Consumer electronics like smart phones, as Isaac Wilder, the head of the Free Network Foundation, once said, are “essentially made of suffering.”But that suffering is typically an ocean or two away, so we’ve gotten pretty good at not paying too much attention to it. Says the American public: well, those people are really poor and that’s just how things are over there. And didn’t that fat guy make a bunch of that stuff up, anyway?So here’s another depressing ingredient in your iPhone, and this one is right in your backyard: The death of scores of cell phone tower servicers, or “climbers,” who get paid about $10 an hour to climb 1,000 feet to do maintenance work.Propublica and PBS Frontline have released an exhaustive report about the phenomenon of climbers’ deaths, and while the numbers are eye-opening, it’s the same old story at the core of it all: Too few people doing too much work, cost-cutting that results in shoddy safety equipment and strained working conditions, and next to no oversight. And since these guys are almost always working as subcontractors for a third party, the cell companies can sweep their deaths under the rug as they occur, and catch little flack for it.Read the rest over at Motherboard.