Apple Inc. said it found more than a dozen serious violations of labor laws or Apple’s own rules at its suppliers that needed immediate correction.

The findings were outlined in a company report on audits of 102 supplier facilities conducted in 2009. That was a year in which questions about the practices of one of Apple’s suppliers came into focus after the suicide of a Chinese worker who held a sensitive job handling iPhones.

Along with many other technology companies, Apple, based in Cupertino, Calif., relies heavily on foreign contractors to build its products. Monitoring their labor practices be difficult, and Apple has caught heat in the past on this issue.

The company said in its latest report that “by making social responsibility a fundamental part of the way we do business, we insist that our suppliers take Apple’s code as seriously as we do.”

Apple said it found 17 “core” violations, the most serious type.

Those included three cases of underage workers being hired; eight instances of workers paying “recruitment” fees that were above the legal limits in those countries; three cases in which suppliers used non-certified vendors to dispose of hazardous waste; and three others in which the companies gave false records during the audits.

In the cases involving underage workers, Apple said three facilities had hired a total of 11 workers who were 15 years old in countries where the minimum employment age is 16. Apple noted that the workers were no longer underage or weren’t working for the facilities anymore when the audits were undertaken.

Apple has been pressured before to answer questions about its suppliers’ practices.

Last July, a 25-year-old Chinese worker whose job involved shipping iPhone prototypes to Apple killed himself by jumping from the 12th floor of his apartment building amid an investigation into a missing iPhone. The worker, Sun Danyong, worked for the Foxconn Technology Group, a Taiwanese manufacturer that has long been one of Apple’s key suppliers.

Walmart and the Kroger supermarket chain have severed ties with one of the country’s major blueberry growers after an ABC News investigation found children, including one as young as five-years-old, working in its fields.

The children were discovered at the Adkin Blue Ribbon Packing Company, in South Haven, Michigan, this summer by graduate school students working with ABC News as fellows with the Carnegie Corporation.

A five-year-old girl, named Suli, was seen lugging two heavy buckets of blueberries picked by her parents and brothers, aged seven and eight.

An 11-year-old boy in the Adkin fields told the Carnegie fellows he had been picking blueberries since the age of eight.

The owner of the company, Randy Adkin, was once featured on a Walmart billboard advertising his “locally produced and locally sold” blueberries.

“Walmart will not tolerate the use of child labor,” said a spokesperson who said the retailer was unaware of the children at the Adkin facility until contacted by ABC News.

“We will not purchase any additional product from Adkin Blue ribbon Packing Company pending the outcome of an investigation by our ethical sourcing team,” the Walmart spokesperson said.

Separately, the Department of Labor cited Adkin this week for violating federal child labor laws. Inspectors reported they found a six-year-old picking blueberries in Adkin’s fields this summer.

As part of the ABC News investigation, the four Carnegie fellows spent weeks in fruit and vegetable fields in Michigan, New Jersey and North Carolina.

“What it really comes down to is small fingers picking the smaller fruits and vegetables,” said Joel Stonington, a recent graduate of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

In Michigan, a legal aid attorney who works with migrant families, Teresa Hendricks, said the enforcement of the federal child labor law is “very lax.”

On Friday, the United Fresh Produce Association sent a letter to its members referencing the “alarming” ABC News investigation, urging members to “redouble your efforts to ensure that no young children are ever working illegally on our farms.”

The Law & Child Workers

The law prohibits, with only a few rare exceptions, the use of any child under the age of 12 on large agricultural operations.

Yet, as migrant families try to scrap by on meager earnings, they often put their children to work with the tacit acquiescence of growers and their foremen.

“Everybody knows that’s the economic reality for the families,” said Hendricks, “and so it’s something that happens and people just put their head in the sand and know that it happens, a nod and a wink and we look the other way.”

Adkin, the Michigan grower, told ABC News he “would fire” anyone who allowed children to work in his fields. Indeed, Carnegie fellows Angela Boyd, from Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, and Kieran Meadows, from the City University of New York’s Graduate School of Journalism, saw a sign in Adkin’s fields one day saying children were prohibited.

The sign was lying in the back of a truck the next day when the Carnegie fellows videotaped the children in the fields.

Human rights groups say the use of child labor is widespread in fruit and vegetable fields across the country.

“Americans think of child labor as a problem elsewhere, but in fact we have that problem in our own backyard,” said Zama Coursen-Neff of Human Rights Watch, which is conducting its own investigation of child labor practices in the U.S.

“There is child labor in agriculture in almost every state in the United States,” she told ABC News.

In North Carolina, Carnegie fellows Stonington and Linsay Rousseau Burnett, of the U.C. Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, recorded children working in tomato fields in the western part of the state.

The nurse with a migrant health clinic program, Josie Ellis, told the fellows she is concerned for the health of the young children given the widespread use of pesticides in the fields.

“A lot of the chemicals that the kids are around cause respiratory illness, neurologic impairments, contact dermatitis, really severe rashes on their bodies,” Ellis said.

The nurse said her complaints to the U.S. Department of Labor office, several hours away in Raleigh, rarely resulted in any action.

“They just don’t seem to really care,” she said.

The Obama administration’s Secretary of Labor, Hilda Solis, promised a crackdown on child labor violations after taking office.

This summer, labor inspectors cited blueberry growers in North Carolina, Arkansas and New Jersey for using children in their fields, with fines averaging $1,100 per child.

While advocates for children welcomed the enforcement efforts, many say the fines levied by the Department of Labor, are so slight they’re little more than a slap on the wrist.

“I think it’s shameful that our nation tolerates child labor,” said Ellis, the North Carolina nurse.

Human Rights Watch investigators say the law needs to be broadened so that it is illegal for children who are 12 and 13 to work in agricultural settings.

“We don’t let them work in factories,” said Coursen-Neff, “only in agriculture are kids allowed to trade in their health and education.”

The executive director of the North American Blueberry Council, Mark Villata, said the industry “does not condone the use of child labor.”

But, said Villata, “we cannot control the practices of every one of the more than 2,000 blueberry growers in the United States.” He said he believes the ABC News report “represents only a tiny segment of our industry.”

Children’s Sermon: Giving Away Your Money to the Poor

Props: Two bowls of chocolate on a table, one full of fair trade chocolate, one full of regular chocolate, both covered with a cloth. I picked up small $.25 candy bars and a bag of gold coins at Ten Thousand villages, but you can go on-line to www.serrv.org or www.globalexchange.org to find fair trade chocolate as well. Cadbury has also recently gone Fair Trade. Oh and many thanks to Julie Clawson and her new book “Everyday Justice” for inspiring and informing this children’s sermon.

Good Morning! So, we are well into the month of October already. Are you having a good Fall? Do you like this month? What are some of the best things about October (leaves changing color, cool air, the first fire in the fireplace). And isn’t there a really fun holiday at the end of October? Halloween! That’s right. Are you already thinking about what you want to be? Great. Well I thought today I’d help you get ready for that holiday by talking to you about one of the most important parts. Can you guess what that might be? Candy, right. (reveal the chocolate)

Now I have two bowls of chocolate here. Can you tell me the difference between them? (one is full of snickers and one is full of other stuff, color of the wrappers, one more familiar). Well let me tell you the most important difference. This bowl here is full of Fair Trade chocolate and this bowl here is not. Do you know what Fair Trade means? It means that the people who worked to grow the cocoa beans to make the chocolate were paid fairly so they have enough money to live on. So if it’s not Fair Trade, do you know what that means? It means that whoever grew the cocoa beans for this bowl of chocolate wasn’t paid fairly at all. In fact I learned something very sad this week. I learned that most of the cocoa beans grown in the world are grown by people who receive little to no money at all, and that many of them are children; children who have been taken out of school and in some cases even taken from their families and they are forced to work all day for no money at all in really horrible conditions. We have a word for that kind of treatment. It’s called slavery. It’s supposed to be illegal, but it still happens all over the world.

But there is something very powerful we can do to help those kids and get the big chocolate companies to start treating them fairly. We can refuse to buy any chocolate that is not Fair Trade and tell every one we know to do the same. I got this chocolate from Ten Thousand Villages over in Northampton, but you can also get Fair Trade chocolate at Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s, you can order it on line, or you can buy Cadbury chocolates, because they just recently made the commitment to go Fair Trade. It may be a little harder to find, it may mean skipping our favorite brands for the more familiar candy we are used to, and it may mean spending more money, but I think it is worth it to help those kids and their families.

You know in our gospel reading today, a young man comes up to Jesus and asks what he must do to inherit eternal life. After they go back and forth a bit, Jesus tells him to give away all of his money to the poor and the young man walks away sad because he was a very rich man, and that meant giving away a lot of money. I think this story scares a lot of people because they don’t want to give away all of their money, but how we use our money really matters and if we can give even some of it away in ways that help others we’re at least on the right track.

I think buying Fair Trade chocolate (or sugar or coffee or bananas) is a great way of giving our money to the poor and helping them. And it’s definitely more expensive. This bowl of Fair Trade cost me $8 and this bowl only cost me $____. Spending three dollars for a little bag of chocolate coins when you could get a whole big bag of mini snickers bars, might seems like giving your money away, and it is, but it’s giving to people Jesus cares about and who we ought to care about too because they are our neighbors and also children of God. So I hope you’ll only give out Fair Trade Chocolate this Halloween at your house and that you’ll encourage all of your friends to do the same. Sound like a good plan? Great. Let’s have a prayer together.

Dear Lord, please help us to help others by using our money lovingly and wisely. And please bring an end to the selfishness and greed that is hurting children around the world. Amen.

Kids across all 50 US States and Canada will urge nearly a quarter million households to shift purchasing to Fair Trade certified chocolate, coffee, etc by handing Fair Trade chocolate to adults.

A pleasant surprise will greet nearly a quarter million people distributing candy at their door, when youth reverse the Halloween tradition to hand adults a sample of vegan-friendly, Fair Trade dark chocolate.

The chocolate will be accompanied by a card informing recipients of poverty and child labor problems in the cocoa industry, affecting mainstream candy enjoyed at Halloween and around the year, and how Fair Trade certified chocolate provides a solution.

Parents of last year’s youngest participants raved about how Reverse Trick-or-Treating transformed Halloween into a meaningful event when youthful activists can give back to their neighbors and to cocoa growing communities.

The chocolate and cards are FREE! Thanks to generous donations by these Fair Trade chocolate companies:
· Equal Exchange
· Alter Eco
· Sweet Earth
· La Siembra

Participating lead nonprofit organizations:
· Africa Action
· Amherst Fair Trade Partnership
· Ballston Spa Fair Trade Coalition
· Fair Trade Federation
· Global Exchange
· Green America
· International Labor Rights Forum
· Jeannette Rankin Peace Center
· Oasis/Stop The Traffik
· San Diego Friends of Fair Trade
· Unitarian Universalist Service Committee
· United Methodist Church (UMCOR/GBCS)

Participating organizations include: Africa Faith and Justice Network, Americans for Informed Democracy, Archdiocese of Los Angeles, Chicago Area Interfaith Council Peace and Justice Center, Durham Fair Trade Coalition, Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, Fair Trade LA, Fair Trade Portsmouth Coalition, Fair Trade Resource Network, Human Rights Action Service, InterReligious Task Force on Central America, NY State Labor-Religion Coalition, Organic Consumer Association, Washington Fair Trade Coalition

Reverse Trick-or-Treating is an initiative of Global Exchange’s Sweet Smarts network, with leadership from Equal Exchange and all of the organizations and companies listed above.

Reverse Trick-or-Treating is an initiative of Global Exchange’s Sweet Smarts network, with leadership from Equal Exchange and all of the organizations and companies listed above.

For more information visit globalexchange.org.

WASHINGTON – Children are used to produce everything from pornography in Ukraine to fireworks in the Philippines and diamonds in Sierra Leone, the US Department of Labor said in a report published Thursday.
The report lists 122 goods “produced with forced labor, child labor, or both, in 58 countries” from Afghanistan to North Korea to Uzbekistan.

“Agricultural crops comprise the largest category, followed by manufactured goods and mined or quarried goods,” said the report, which was mandated by Congress in 2005, when lawmakers passed the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act. Child labor was more common than forced labor, and the goods most often produced by children were cotton, sugarcane, tobacco, coffee, rice, and cocoa in agriculture; bricks, garments, carpets, and footwear in manufacturing; and gold and coal in mined or quarried goods. Strawberries from Argentina, footwear from Bangladesh, gold and silver from Bolivia, and rubber from Cambodia were brought to international markets thanks to child labor. Myanmar used child and forced labor to produce 14 products, ranging from jade to teak wood. In India, children worked on glass bangles, leather goods and soccer balls; in Pakistan, they are used to make carpets. And in Russia and Ukraine, the Philippines and Thailand, they were used in the production of pornography. “The International Labor Organization estimates that over 12 million persons worldwide are working in some form of forced labor or bondage and that more than 200 million children are at work, many in hazardous forms of labor,” the report said. The global economic crisis has “exacerbated the vulnerability” of the most easily exploited workers, including children, women and migrants, it added. The list was the first of its kind to be published by the US Labor Department.