There are NO underage workers building Apple products. ZERO. Apple audits the supply chain and there are draconian penalties for contractors who break Apple's contracts prohibiting hiring underage workers, starting with requiring the contractor to pay for a full ride college education through age 25 for any underage worker found in their employ, up to losing ALL Apple contracts. Apple has actually pulled multi-Billion dollar contracts from suppliers for violating labor conditions in their contracts.
A audit of ten years of employees among millions of employees in Apple's supply chain found approximately 70 underage workers, most of whom were around sixteen years of age and who had used faked or borrowed identity cards to get hired. All of these were offered the scholarships paid by the contractors who had erroneously failed to vet them correctly and hired them. Surprisingly, about 25% turned down the offer and preferred to go to work elsewhere so they could continue sending their wages to their families.
One company in Indonesia was found to systematically hire underage workers and apple pulled a $2 Billion contract and black-balled them from all future Apple work. The job they were doing went to another company that cost Apple more.
Apple's workers in their supply chain run 18 to 32 years of age with some older, but there are no SEVEN YEAR OLD CHILDREN anywhere. That is a propaganda lie, or one you just made up for your post.
If what you claim were true, the companies that contract for Apple also contract to make consumer electronics for Microsoft, HP, Lenovo, Sony, Samsung, and 500 other companies, so every single one of those companies would be just as guilty as Apple. . . but in fact, Apple is the ONLY one who places its own employees in its supply chain to assure compliance with its. In fact, one other myth needs to be laid to rest: ALL of the suicides that were attributed to Apple assembly line workers in Apple's supply chain were not in Apple's supply chain. The workers who "reportedly" killed themselves because of dire working conditions at FoxConn in 2010 did not kill themselves due to working conditions, nor were there that many in a population of workers of over 800,000. (It was a suicide rate that turned out to be an amazingly low 0.75 per 100,000 workers per year compared to 11 per 100,000 in the USA in the same age cohorts and it was FAR lower than the suicide rate among students in American IVY LEAGUE UNIVERSITIES!) The workers the news media attributed to Apple were actually working at a plant making Microsoft Xboxes, HP Computers, Sony Playstations, and Nokia cellular phones. The plant was 150 miles away from the nearest assembly line for any Apple products.
The infamous threat of a mass suicide where 150-200 employees threatened to jump off of the roof during a labor dispute occurred when the employees were being moved from assembling Microsoft Xboxes where they had unlimited opportunities for overtime to another assembly line manufacturing HP computer cases, with ZERO overtime available because of no demand. They were unhappy about the move. . . and demanded equal overtime availability at the new line.
So much for the Apple Labor Suicide myth.
Apple pays the assembly line workers on its lines three to seven times the minimum factory wage in China. That's some slave labor rates, Iceman, because, the Apple assembly line workers are in the lower end of the bourgeoning Chinese middle class.
Try to learn the some modicum of FACTS before you spout mis-information about slave labor.
#8 See links at the site for additional articles.
http://businessethicscases.blogspot.com/2013/04/apple-inc-severe-employee-abuse-2011.html
Compared to other occupations these folks would have to do I would say they are better off temporarily as they could take the experience and move on to other better jobs.