Apple found 91 children working at its suppliers’ plants last year, nine times as many as the previous year, the company’s annual supply chain report reveals.

 

Apple auditors discovered 91 children employed at ten facilities, compared with 11 in three locations the previous year, the report said. The company dismissed one supplier that had hired 42 under-age workers from a local school and given them false IDs.

 

The Silicon Valley firm also acknowledged that 137 workers at the Wintek factory in Suzhou had been poisoned by the cleaning agent n-hexane. Previously it had said just 62 had been affected.

 

The report covers audits of 127 facilities, most of them for the first time, compared with 102 in 2009. It said employees at 76 facilities had worked more than the maximum 60 hours in most weeks.

 

It is the first since a spate of suicides by staff of iPhone manufacturer Foxconn made worldwide headlines, putting under fresh scrutiny Apple’s relationship with firms that assemble its products.

 

In response to the suicides, which came as Apple raced to meet orders for the iPhone 4 and iPad, it sent a team led by then-COO Tim Cook to Foxconn’s Shenzhen plant. The team evaluated Foxconn’s response and interviewed more than 1,000 staff, leading to among other things the establishment of a 24-hour care center.

 

But despite the broader scope of the latest audit, Apple drew fire from critics.

 

Ma Jun of the Institute for Public and Environmental Affairs, told the Guardian it was “positive” that Apple had admitted the number of victims of the n-hexane leak. 

 

But he said that by not naming its suppliers, Apple showed it was “still not ready to accept public scrutiny.”