As a shareholder I am appalled. I honestly thought Apple was clued in on maintaining more direct supervision on their primary supplier? While most iPhone users will not care that children toiled to manufacture their phone, this can only hurt the brand.

Foxconn used 14-year-old interns at its factory in China

Apple's Taiwanese manufacturing partner admits breaking law by taking on children as workers via schools programme

guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 17 October 2012 07.50 BST

Foxconn workers at a rally in the southern Chinese township of Longhau following a series of suicides among employees in 2010. Photograph: Bobby Yip/Reuters

Taiwan's Foxconn, the world's largest contract electronics maker, has admitted using student interns as young as 14 in a Chinese factory.

The case is in breach of national law and raises further questions about its intern programme.

Employment rights activists in China have accused Foxconn and other big employers in the country of using young student interns as a cheap source of labour for production lines, where it is difficult to attract adult workers to lower-paid jobs.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/oct/17/foxconn-children-14-factory-china

I worked as a House Page or Intern on Capitol Hill in Washington DC. Interns or Pages can volunteer for Senators and Congressmen.

It's great experience. I started at age 16. Some started a little earlier but most around 16 or 17. It's a very coveted experience as they only take the best or well connected.

At lot of the people I interned with went on to become very successful and well known.

Didn't work for me however ;-)

anyway this does not sound so bad. These interns are probably go getters and well regarded.

Apple's Taiwanese manufacturing partner admits breaking law by taking on children as workers via schools programme

gimme a break!

in Continental Europe, when primary school was 8 classes (till the mid 1960s) instead of 10, a fourteen-year old started working as an apprentice in various trades where he was used during the first year to do all kind of shitty and hard work and everybody considered it as normal even though industrialisation was light years ahead of nowadays China.

The case is in breach of national law and raises further questions about its intern programme.

yeah right! the bleeding hearts should go to China and watch (not only in rural areas) 8 and 9 nine-year old boys and girls doing all kind of work.

I'm sure Apple are very concerned about these facts, so are Nike, Dell, HP, Disney and many others

The great thing about FoxConn is its sheer size. At over 1M workers, shit is going to happen pretty much all the time. Suicides? Underage workers? Pretty much anything you can imagine that would be bad will happen in a population of 1M+, and it won't even take very long.

As an aside FoxConn have stated that these interns didn't work on any Apple product lines, FWIW - apparently nobody cares, and certainly not the media, if Apple isn't involved, so saying that it has nothing to do with Apple is the best way to make a story go away.... says more about the media than about FC this whole thing.

Oh yeah everybody I know was an intern at 15 or 16 years old at one company or another over the summer. In the heart of Europe. Oh, the outrage!

I have seen a two year old working in a Chinese factory. & I thought it was beautiful.

She was sitting beside her mum, putting two pieces together and then handing them to her mum, who put a nut on or something & passed it down. 2YO was too young to go to school, so her education can't be suffering, she was sitting beside the person she loved most & making that person happy!

Who is to say kids are not to be productive members of society?

I worked for / with my Dad on holidays from about the age of 10. Best time of my life. Who has the right to deny me, or any kid, that pleasure, and that excellent 'non school education'?

MYOB, unions.

The case is in breach of national law and raises further questions about its intern programme.

yeah right! the bleeding hearts should go to China and watch (not only in rural areas) 8 and 9 nine-year old boys and girls doing all kind of work.

Also in Thailand.

One of the few progressive schools here schedules its' holidays to coincide with the rice harvest. Up here for thinking?

A 2 yo is controversial for sure - one thing everyone needs to understand is the cause for child labor though: Poverty.

The cause is not bad parents, greedy factory owners, or multinational corporations. If these kids - or their parents, respectively - had money, they'd not work in factories, they'd be going to international schools or whatever. The first time there was an outrage about child labor in textile factories, the factories in question were forced by their corporate clients to fire all underage workers. Unlike FoxConn, actual kids worked in these factories, which is of course sad. But, the effect was that the kids were now unemployed and forced to beg on the streets. Victory for the western Gutmenschen?!

They should initiate a "buck tip for the workers" in the pricing.....like a tip added to all sales with their $xx99 pricing.....poor buggers churning out this high-end stuff getting monkey nuts for pay.