> Second, the companies paying these children are extracting value from their labor greater than what they are paying the child laborers.
This is always the case with employment, assuming that the employer isn't getting ripped off: when two parties make a voluntary trade, they're both getting something they value more than what they're trading away.
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> In other words, this article, in my analysis, is an opportunity to study and question the system that creates the conditions such that there is a labor market comprising children who are available for exploitation for cheap labor by very rich Western companies.
I don't see anything that needs explaining here. Poverty is the default. For almost all of human history we were dirt poor. For almost all of agricultural history we were in a hungry, unpleasant Malthusian equilibrium.
The real miracle is that things are getting better. And a big part of why things are getting better is because it's possible for richer countries to 'exploit' cheap labor in poorer countries – and help them escape poverty by doing it. It's amusing how companies keep looking for cheap labor in different countries every few years, because the places that used to have the cheapest labor got wealthier because of those opportunities. I realize that not everybody shares my aesthetics, but personally I see this as beautiful, even if the ground-level details are a bit grungy.