Apple's chief executive, Tim Cook, who in a previous role was responsible for building Apple's supply chain, has been under pressure to push through changes after the suicides at Foxconn, whose manufacturing operations are largely based in China. Last year he described the use of underage labour as "abhorrent", saying it was "extremely rare in our supply chain", and stepped up measures to weed out bad practice including hiring an independent auditor, the Fair Labor Association. In an interview on Thursday, Apple senior vice president of operations Jeff Williams said the company has increased its efforts to solve two of the most challenging issues - ensuring there are no under aged workers in its supply chain and limiting working hours to 60 hours a week. One Chinese supplier, a circuit board component maker called Guangdong Real Faith Pingzhou Electronics, was axed by Apple after 74 children under the age of 16 were recruited to work on its production lines. Apple also discovered an employment agency that was forging documents to allow children to illegally work at the supplier. Apple ordered its suppliers to reimburse excessive recruitment fees – anything higher than one month's wages – and said $6.4m (£4m) was handed back to contract workers in 2012. Apple also found and stopped discriminatory practices against women workers in 34 supplier facilities that required pregnancy testing and 25 facilities that tested employees for certain medical conditions, the report said.
– Apple's own audit of its supply chain turned up 106 underage workers at overseas plants last year, reports the Guardian. Most of the violations—74 of them—occurred at one China facility. The kids were ordered home, and Apple cut ties with the plant, which makes components for circuit boards. In all, 11 factories had at least one worker under age 16, often because their families worked with recruiters to forge IDs. While Apple has had high-profile problems at its Foxconn production plant in China, the facilities involved in this report are mostly lower-level parts suppliers. "We go deep in the supply chain to find it," an Apple VP tells Business Insider. "And when we do find it, we ensure that the underage workers are taken care of, the suppliers are dealt with." Foxconn has previously acknowledged hiring underage interns, and Apple says a main focus now is making sure that plants don't abuse the concept of internships.