Tech giants sued over deaths of children who mine cobalt
cbc.ca
cbc.ca
But I'm not at all certain the court is willing consider the purchase of goods on the world market to be equivalent to "participation" in this venture, even if the suit asserts that "The Cobalt Supply Chain Is a “Venture”". Is there meaningful precedent for interpreting a supply chain in this way?
The difference is that in this case the children and their families are the actual plaintiffs which presumably changes the legal merits. I still suspect that this case will also be dismissed.
I think the point is that these lawsuits are intended to raise public awareness of the issue which will ideally put pressure the companies being sued to institute voluntary policing of their supply chain. Nestle, for example, has done a lot over the last decade to eliminate child labor in their supply chain.
(Edit) It looks like there is a supreme Court precedent related to the Nestle case that held that child/family plaintiffs did have standing to sue for child labor in the supply chain [2]
[1] https://www.confectionerynews.com/Article/2018/02/13/Nestle-...
[2] https://news.yahoo.com/u-supreme-court-gives-boost-child-sla...
Sad that the courts are so slanted in the favor of corporate interests. Why do these cases get dismissed?
A "fungible market" does not make slavery ok, nor does it excuse child labor. Indeed, the availability of alternative sources would seem to make patronizing companies that support this type of bevaior more inexcusable.
What's this you say? You don't have a direct relationship with the cobalt mine? You buy your phone from some company, and you don't know their exact sources of components, or whether they switch suppliers from time to time? Gasp!
I am confident that my electronics do indeed contain some cobalt from the exact same sort of mines referenced in the article and I do feel culpable. I wish there was an organization that tracked the degree to which the electronic companies that I purchase products from make an effort to source ethical cobalt and other sources (hence my prior question elsewhere in this thread.) I wish that Fairphone sold their products in my country. I wish that I, as an individual consumer had the level of market power that a company like samsung or google has over their supply chain and could incentivize the cobalt mining companies to behave more ethically.
You sarcasm doesn't make any actual point and to me it indicates that the reason that you are so willing to argue against the culpability of the electronics, battery and cobalt mining companies that make so much money from this is because you are unwilling to acknowledge your own culpability in the deaths of these children and the suffering of their families.
The point is a limited one. Besides this point, reform efforts are a great idea.
The courts are in favor of upholding the law, not about exacting righteousness from all people.
Cobalt is a commodity which fungible and generally available on the world market. It may be refined at several steps, purchased by one company, put in storage with cobalt from other suppliers, and resold to another company. There may be general purchase records, but there are no specific records of how the physical cobalt ore was stored in a mineral silo. There is also the possibility that records that do exist could be faked for the purpose of fraud.
It is thus not common for the law to mandate that the manufacturers know exactly what has happened to every ounce of the substances that make up their product, or for the law to make this criminality contagious, such that anyone who does business with anyone who does business with anyone who does business with slave labor goes to jail.
That is a strawman argument. The article quite clearly states the the claim lawsuit aims to prove is this:
"knowingly benefiting from and aiding and abetting the cruel and brutal use of young children."
Specifically, they claim there is evidence of a direct links in the supply chain:
"Certainly the supply chain is opaque. It is complex. But the plaintiffs all were injured and killed at mines owned by companies that have been publicly disclosed as sellers of cobalt to our defendants.
There is quite a bit more evidence contained in the complaint linked in the article. It is pretty clear that any "opaqueness" that does exist in the sourcing of Cobalt is a deliberate attempt to limit the perception of culpability.
When this suit is resolved and the company is found not to be liable, as is likely, then we can talk reform efforts and opacity all day long, and we can draft new laws, and discuss the extent to which they actually help.
Beyond the legal merits, tech companies have been talking about "conflict minerals" for a while. You could certainly doubt how seriously committed they are to resolving the minerals-sourcing issues, or even what their motivations are: my unconfirmed assumptions are that "conflict minerals" https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/policy/policy-confli... was conceived by Intel as an adaptation of the "conflict diamonds" campaign, and that the "conflict diamonds" campaign was in turn something contrived by De Beers as a marketing effort. But what's remarkable is how little consumers seem to have cared or responded even when manufacturers made the running on the issue. It seems it's much easier to get consumers on an ethical-sourcing bandwagon when the product is a luxury good bought for social-signaling purposes (like fur coats or diamonds) than when it's something they look on as a quotidian expense or something to get the most bang for the buck in. Which is unfortunate, I think: consumers probably should get off their arses and on the likely-somewhat-sleazy "conflict minerals" bandwagon, because it's likely the best chance to meet our responsibilities and effect real change in the sourcing of minerals for electronic devices.
The total spectrum looks like this:
- purposefully: you won't buy cobalt, unless it says "mined by slave children" on the tin
- knowingly: you buy cobalt even if it says "mined by slave children" on the tin
- recklessly: you know that 90% of world cobalt is mined by slave children. You hope that yours comes from the remaining 10%
- negligently: you know that 10% of world cobalt is mined by slave children, so you decided to take a chance and bought yours without checking
- accidentally: you know there's a risk of buying cobalt mined by slave children. So, you took the actions of a reasonable person to avoid that risk, but you failed.
0) lawyers suing have questionable history
BUT 1) Child labor in Africa is a serious problem that needs to be addressed, and just about anything sourced from Africa will have this problem.
2) The Kamoto mine in question is a copper mine. Cobalt is a secondary product. (One could just about as legitimately call attention to products using copper.)
3) Tesla is targeted in the lawsuit but does not use Congolese cobalt.
4) Possible exception to this is some possible future Tesla cells could come from LGChem which gets some of its lithium from Umicore. However, LGChem is the primary supplier of cells for GM and several other EV producers... Yet they are not named in this lawsuit.
5) Kamoto is a modern industrial mine. Artisanal mines are where child labor is used. Unskilled child labor is of dubious use in highly mechanized industrial mining sites.
6) However, Kamoto has had problems with pirate artisanal mines on its property and has tried to get the Congolese army to help keep them out. (So I guess the lawsuit would be that Kamoto has not been able to keep out illegal artisanal mines from its property?)
7) Regardless of all these points, we NEED to stop this dangerous child labor in Africa, and it's probably a good thing that this sort of thing is drawing attention to the issue.
(Note, I'm mentioning Tesla here because I'm most familiar with it and it's also mentioned most in the thread, but it's possible similar arguments apply to other companies listed: It seems they're listed because they're well-known, large tech companies, not necessarily due to amount of cobalt use or even use of unethical cobalt at all.)
It's largely just a security problem. But I'm sure the activists don't want violent military guys pushing off the pirate mines.
The other question is the pipelines that purchase from the 'artisanal' mines. Those people could be targeted and better regulated.
But as we've seen in the diamond and gold industries that's been a very hard thing to do in African countries without stable governments or strong incentives to stop them.
If the goal is to actually stop it and not some vindictive pursuit of western companies who people want to take all of the blame, then upping security and oversight of the mines with financial goals and on-sight oversight teams to measure progress. Plus some financial incentives to the various players to reports the dangerous supply lines which are using kids, so it's not putting a poor person between having something and total poverty out for some moral purpose which they will disregard.
There needs to be some international/African Union pressure to stop some of the proxy warfare going on in central Africa and some way to ensure stability in Congo.
Apple has made a lot of progress on environmental and supplier labor issues over the last couple of years. And I'm pretty sure that getting picketed by activists and other pressure tactics played some role in that.
https://www.apple.com/supplier-responsibility/pdf/Apple_SR_2... https://images.apple.com/environment/pdf/Apple_Environmental...
If the DRC is going to allow (or ignore) child labor for Cobalt mining, then there should be tariffs that would make it so expensive that it would make Australian or Canadian Cobalt mines profitable (where we know the workers are fairly compensated and can work in safe environments).
If India is going to look the other way for poor labor practices in ship breaking then there should be a big tariff on the recycled steel that drives that industry. Making properly managed, safe ship breaking in well regulated countries competitive.
If China wants to allow heavy industrial production with no environmental protections, then there should be tariffs on that to make countries that do regulate industrial pollution competitive.
When these countries finally clean up their labor practices and make things safe and equitable for their workers and the environment, then the tariffs go away.
Companies should NOT be able to exploit repression, bullying unsafe practices, child labor or pollution by proxy etc. in order to reduce their costs by moving production to such a country. Trade tariffs, when wielded honestly and effectively should be a tool to prevent that.
Eh, I don't think giving more money to the third world mining companies is going to guarantee they're going to stop using child labor. The simplest and least risky decision for the tech companies is to simply stop buying Congolese cobalt. It's "blood diamonds" all over again.
But the supply would have to adjust away from the sanctioned region(s) to meet the existing demand.
Glencore headquarters is in Switzerland
40 years after to completely own its politics.
60 years after to completely own its crime and corruption.
So yeah, about now is when Belgium is entirely off the hook. If they still feel involved from colonialist guilt-trips, that's their own problem. It's time for homegrown domestic scapegoats.
Time to stop blaming the victims of crimes Europeans have been committing for 2-3+ centuries? now...
"third-world mining operation": a mining operation that is also a third-world operation.
VS
"third-world-mining operation": an operation for mining of the third world
VS
"third-world third-world-mining operation": a third-world operation for mining of the third world
VS
"first-world third-world-mining operation": a company headquartered in CH that mines in the deep backcountry of the DRC.
Yes, the US government could pass laws and start fining companies that use child labor is their supply chain. You better bet that losing access to the world's largest consumer economy would force the mining companies to change their practices.
You can choose to absolve yourself of responsibility for the actions of these mining companies, but our collective purchasing choices definitely have a direct causal effect on these types of abuses.
> the liability is with the mining company and national government of Congo.
Asserting that liability can only rest with a single party is simple minded.
Would you have no problem buying ivory, since it's the poacher who acted immorally, and you as the end consumer have no responsibility as to how it was supplied?
I don't throw this word around lightly, but what we are enabling in the Congo is evil, and all so we can drive expensive electric cars and pretend like we're making the world better. It's pathetic.
So clearly it's not an issue of cobalt, it's a problem within the Congo.
It really is unfortunate. The mining company should build out proper infrastructure but I’m guessing they just delegate to (corrupt) locals.
This is no different than all the global environmental issues we’re facing with large scale production facilities (bottled water, petroleum, etc. are a huge problem too). The indigenous populations are getting fucked over because they live in remote areas prime for exploitation. Then the factories close down and don’t clean anything up.
I should point out this is also happening in developed countries like Canada and the USA. For instance, what is the difference between children mining cobalt and children being exposed to mercury poisoning because their rivers upstream there’s a paper plant dumping toxic waste into the food supply in Ontario, or petrol industry in Texas poisoning neighboring schools with chemical fumes.
https://www.glencore.com/media-and-insights/news/Glencore-st...
What is that supposed to mean?
We all depend on taxes. Have you heard of public infrastructure? NASA? DoJ?
It's super disingenuous to pretend that the average employee is somehow getting massive value from giant tech companies. Someone would need to be very (probably intentionally) oblivious to believe that.
Big companies a century ago made a lot of cash out of exploiting slave labour overseas. And, I'm sure, plenty of people thought they couldn't live without whatever commodity they were getting for cheap on the back of foreign lives.
This hasn't stopped. We need to keep the dialogue open. The axes should be just as sharp for the new colonial powers.
Maybe it seems like there's a never-ending stream of history to be on the wrong side of, but that can't be an impediment to action.
(Apologies if the parent comment was satyrical)
Also interesting they included Tesla who has consistently used ethically sourced Cobalt (and others who have campaigned for ethical cobalt have acknowledged this).
I suspect folks commenting here are right that this is a publicity stunt.
EDIT: One good that could come from this publicity stunt, though, is more focus on the legitimate problem of child labor in Africa.
>Michael uses the example of someone buying roses. A man hundreds of years ago got a lot of Good Place points because he grew and picked his own roses to give to his grandmother. However, when another man got roses for his grandmother, he lost points. It’s because he ordered them through a cell phone that was made in a sweatshop, the flowers were grown with toxic pesticides, delivered from thousands of miles away creating a large carbon footprint and the money went to a greedy CEO that sexually harassed women.
IANAL, but it seems very obvious from both the article and the lawsuit that there is no foundation to this. The article acknowledges this is essentially new ground, but it doesn't even seem to be based on anything legal at all. Looking at the actual complaint (http://iradvocates.org/sites/iradvocates.org/files/stamped%2...) it is very telling that in a 79 page suit barely over 2 pages is related to "jurisdiction and venue". That is a major component of this case, in addition to the totally untested claims being attempted here in this case. Having barely over 2 pages sort of tells you right off the bat that they know this is seriously thin.
Moving to the actual claim, they assert the US court is appropriate based on 18 U.S. Code § 1596. That seems reasonable based on the text. So moving along to the complaints, they claim violations of 18 U.S. Code § 1581, § 1584, § 1589, and § 1590.
1581 and 1584 very clearly and in no uncertain language apply directly to the people employing and controlling the labor itself. This is just a bad faith claim in my opinion and should be tossed out with prejudice.
1589 deals with those who benefit from such activity, which is where we start to see some semblance of sanity from this lawsuit. However, the language clearly indicates that it must be a "venture". This usually means direct agreements, shared ownership, etc. That is not the case in how these tech companies are acquiring these materials so toss that one out as well, unless of course you are prepared to accept that the open market and global supply chain is a venture. Which would then, by logical extension, include anyone and everyone operating on the entirety of the supply chain and market.
1590 reverts back to the same position as 1581 and 1584, dealing directly with those who have direct control over said labor. Again, toss this out with prejudice.
The whole lawsuit is crap as far as I'm concerned. Even a basic reading of the law shows that this suit is trash, regardless of good intentions or not. The only chance in hell they have is somehow convincing the court that Google, Apple, Dell, etc. are all working together in a fiendishly evil "venture" and that they all have direct control over this child labor. Good luck with that.
Honestly, if I were the judge, I'd throw this entire lawsuit in the trash and force the plaintiff(s) to pay the defense fees, if they had requested it via counter-suit.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1581
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1584
> (a) Whoever commits an offense against the United States or aids, abets, counsels, commands, induces or procures its commission, is punishable as a principal.
> (b) Whoever willfully causes an act to be done which if directly performed by him or another would be an offense against the United States, is punishable as a principal.
That does give some more leeway to charge people with crimes here, but I don't think it is enough to sustain the claims of 1581 and 1584, since it seems to be meant to be read as "I'm not doing the dirty deed myself, but I'm telling my henchmen to do it."
Labeling laws are one way to try to make the hidden details of implementation public at the cost of more complex decision-making for consumers. Sometimes large companies can police the supply chain themselves, so that from a consumer perspective, avoiding exploitation becomes part of the brand.
A carbon tax attempts to bundle climate change costs into prices without changing the public API at all. This seems like the most thorough way to make sure every buyer at all levels of the supply chain takes this environmental cost into account in their decision-making, whether they are specifically thinking about it or not.
So it seems the best way to avoid this issue would be for cobalt based on child labor to be unavailable for purchase and a second-best way would be to make sure it's more expensive so that buyers within the supply chain will automatically avoid that dependency.
When we get to the point where consumers need to step in and do the decision-making because nobody else will then this is probably the most inefficient way to do it, but it seems the supply chain won't do it unless they are pushed into it?
No cobalt - no lithium batteries, and no mobile gadgets
No tantalum - no high spec capacitors omnipresent in compact power supplies, thus again no high value electronics as such unless you want to put huge electrolytic caps into your smartphone.
Most people are willing to close their eyes as the issue is far away from home
For example, compare this ancient LT app note [1] with this modern datasheet [2]. The former recommends 450 uH wirewound inductors (see especially the humorous page 22, which recommends selecting one with an appropriate weight of less than 0.25 pounds) and 1000 uF solid tantalum monster capacitors. The latter recommends a 10 uF 0402 ceramic capacitors and 4.7 uH 0805 chip inductors.
Which one is easier?
Forcing anyone to do anything is pretty hard though. The U.S. government can lean on U.S. companies, but will that really save the child miners? Will they all suddenly not be forced into this type of labor if the U.S. companies stop using their services? Those kids will suddenly all be enrolled in school and grow up to be business owners, doctors, nurses, engineers, all using cell phones powered by some much more ethically obtained energy storage device?
I must be feeling down today. Sorry about that.
Troubling times we live in.
My house has 6 computer monitors and I won't even say how many tv sets. I should be completely aware of how much that cost in earth and human but I got to feel smug by recycling the happy color cardboard it was wrapped with.
Even if these companies (or we as consumers) were to stop doing business and pull out of these mining industries, the conflict and suffering in such countries would simply move to some other industry. The people and children would be toiling in agriculture, fishing, maybe piracy, or slave trade. And I do not delude myself to think that the supervisors in those industries are much more charitable than in mining.
While fixing the problems of mining should be done, the underlying root causes of kids having to mine cobalt would not disappear. So think more deliberately about whether band-aiding this one symptom will let you wake up with a clear conscience tomorrow.
Might as well sue the end users too, if that's a viable theory.
Glencore 2018 Annual report: 'the recent appearance of excess levels of uranium in the cobalt hydroxide being produced at Katanga' https://goo.gl/maps/g3VS4pfhS49eduVf8
You can save people's lives by using the Fairphone already. It's free of those.
10 million people are just as powerless as one, if all they do is buy a different phone or whatever. But 10 million people voting for the politicians that will impose sanctions on these companies is going to make a difference. People are willing to buy canvas bags and electric cars, but taking the time to find a party that's willing to hold companies accountable and voting for them is just too much work. Don't "vote with your wallet" - it doesn't work. Vote with your VOTE!
[1] Carbon Majors Report, CDP, 2017
Just giving up and taking deaths for granted is cynical.
For example I went vegan and I feel much better now.
I'm saving the planet while at it without "making sacrifices".
Also handing over responsibility to politicians does not work.
As long as people keep on trashing the planet politicians don't care.
Political parties are only catering to mainstream choices.
Thus you need to start a trend that one day will force politicians to act.
But we have some very good politicians. If I (and enough other people) vote them into our and later the EU parliament, they will in turn vote for things like sanctioning companies for shit that goes down in their supply chain, regulating animal treatment, etc. And that might actually make a difference.
People are way too cynical about politics. Changing your life is great, but it's not what will ultimately decide the outcome of this mess. Politics is where the power lies and if a person in power does not agree with you, no amount of protesting/lifestyle changes is going to make them change their minds. Politicians are not your enemy - bad politicians are. So vote those out and vote the good ones in.
I'm not sure if you noticed but these are warlords running their country. They simply get resold to an ethically compromised supply chain, relabelled, and sold for a premium. And no one is really accountable and none the wiser. Metals fraud is a huge global problem. Also, happens in every industry.
That being said, the Fairphone looks really cool seems less wasteful than the competitors.
It's unconscionable for this to be happening. You make the buyers of that cobalt start caring, you'll make the producers of that cobalt start caring.
This problem should be tackled, but it is worth thinking about likely unintended consequences of whatever power structures you set up to tackle it. I hear the Belgians have some experience ending slavery in parts of Africa.
I think this quickly gets into the details though. How much safety is required and what does it cost? Are there alternative materials that cost less than ethical cobalt? What age restrictions should be put on the labour involved and what will those children do instead (both with their time and to earn money)? Where will the adult workers come from to replace those kids and what training do they need?
My point is it is unreasonable to expect a business to be able to do the kind of oversight that would require the reach of government agencies.
We've tried this before, and failed at it before (with respect to diamonds).
This trade is difficult to break in the current environment. We'd need to get tough on people who we have generally not wanted to get tough with because we want to keep them friendly for a lot of reasons. Not least of which is growing Chinese (and European) influence in the nations of coastal Africa. We know very well that some of the people we need are less than savory. Some of the trade we engage in is less than honest. But it's not just the coltan trade that's influencing our behavior here. There are a lot of different and competing strategic considerations at stake.
My own opinion? This is probably going to blow up in our face in the future, and we'll spend the latter half of this century, (or maybe the first half of the next?), attempting to convince a rapidly developing sub-saharan Africa that we're deeply sorry for the past but you can trust us going forward.
Something that surprised me: Disney centered their 2016 film The Legend of Tarzan in this context.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atrocities_in_the_Congo_Free_S... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congo%E2%80%93Arab_War
In contrast the end user has almost no information, so punishing them is both unfair and ineffective.
All of the products I can buy may or may not contain this unthetical cobalt. I don't know which, and my personal buying choice doesn't effect anything.
What are you proposing, that everyone with a smartphone or a computer be sued? How will that work?
[EDIT] I'd don't really give a fuck about DVs but I'd love if some of the people DVing my comments on this thread would explain how I've misunderstood orthodox "right"-wing approaches to market-based regulation and commons management, since I don't think I'm claiming anything particularly radical here—quite small-c conservative, actually—and would like to know whether and how I'm missing the mark on it.
All of the stock these corporations can buy may or may not contain this unethically-sourced cobalt. They don't know which, and their corporate buying choices don't affect anything.
Judging from these comments, the bar seems to be set at "if you can't prove the product doesn't contain unethically-sourced materials, don't buy it". That standard would apply equally well to end users. Of course you can't simply trust that your suppliers aren't lying to you, or that their suppliers aren't lying to them, so you have to be personally involved in auditing the entire process from mining to final production and delivery.
Or we could just be reasonable and agree that it's sufficient to avoid knowing or reckless involvement with unethical suppliers, and hold those who actually endanger their workers or lie about the sources of the materials they're selling responsible for their own crimes.
It's great to see where your priorities are.
Well, they're (a) further up the supply chain that we are, and (b) have the resources to understand and influence their supply chain. You can be pedantic about the word "direct" if you like but I don't think that's useful.
[EDIT] to clarify, you're right if you're talking about flat costs across all players in an industry, but wrong about fines or liability exposure that targets specific behavior, as it's possible to avoid those and retain lower costs (yes, of course, compliance and that avoidance of liability has a cost that does tend to raise prices somewhat, but so does any action aimed at accomplishing some goal, and supposedly companies are more efficient at that sort of thing than government so this should be a relatively cheap way to achieve some end, if you think markets work fairly well in general)
Again, not arguing for or against but what's so different about taxing consumers on behalf of actual people in a different country vs. taxing them on behalf of the environment?
"Well why can't they restrict themselves to a smaller set of products the supply chains of which they can verify?" well yes, they could, but this is plainly still vastly more burdensome than asking a company to simply make sure the much-smaller set of folks involved in its supply chain aren't killing kids, given the vast resource disparities between the two.
So, while pushing liability "to the end of the chain" may satisfactory complete some kind of line of ethical reasoning, practically speaking it's just a way of saying "I'd rather we do nothing". Pushing the liability to companies might actually accomplish something, without undue burden (as pushing the liability to consumers would, I think it's clear, surely have).
At any rate, isn't the market supposed to be great at sorting these things out? If we could let market-based solutions take over the role of things like food safety certification without massive increases in risk and decreases in convenience and wild inefficiency, as I've seen proposed, then surely these companies can figure out some way to organize a market for supplier validation and inspection that solve the problem more efficiently than government directly inspecting and certifying every part of every supply chain. Right?
It's been designed to be hard to track. Just because the infrastructure is a little hit and miss and the people are overall poorer doesn't mean it's impossible to reliably manage supply lines. The problem is corporations from the "West" don't want to know where the stuff is coming from because they know damn well it's sweatshop labor, minors, political prisoners, and who knows what else. That's why it's so fucking cheap.
Google knows my fucking shoe size at this point: if they, or Apple, or Samsung, or any other company wanted to know, they would know. The problem is they don't know because when people ask uncomfortable questions, they just shrug their shoulders and go "well we aren't responsible." Fuck that. They should be responsible.
Lol. The problem isn't a lack of roads, it's the fact that parts of eastern DRC are still effectively war zones. This isn't tech companies not caring, this is an ongoing war, a government incapable of controlling the country (and hardly the good guys even where they do have control), rebel groups (which have control over minerals and need income) running their own proto-states, long-standing tribal conflicts, militarily powerful neighbors with vested interests in keeping the conflict going and DRC's precious resources flowing over the borders, a widespread Ebola outbreak, and hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing their homes.
Google 'wanting to know' isn't going to solve the chaos in that part of the world that leads to the supply chain tracking problems.
I really don't understand this "that's just the way it is" thinking when it comes to corporations doing shady shit overseas. If I went to my DMV and I said "I need to register this car" and had no proof of purchase, no previous registration, no paperwork from the former owner or dealer, I wouldn't be able to register this car. Yet, somehow, a multiBILLION dollar company can just buy material from warlords or whatever tribe in remote parts of China, and ship MILLIONS OF POUNDS of it out of that region, but nobody can get a fucking receipt? Are you kidding me?
BINGO. That's what you do. If the ass end of Mogadishu can't provide the minerals without using exploitative labor practices, THEN DON'T BUY FROM THE ASS END OF MOGADISHU.
And if that means an iPhone costs $200 more then that's what it fucking means, because no iPhone is worth it's weight in human suffering to have.
You're also insultingly wrong with your geography.
So because we can't fix their situation for them, we're allowed to actively make it worse? This is such a nonsense point of view. Exploitative industry is not like regular industry. This is not a rising tide that lifts all boats, this is enriching one or two psychopathic monsters at the expense of their entire region, and possibly financing even more in other regions.
The West does not need to go in and "fix" every developing nation, but at the same time, saying "well if we didn't sell them scrapheap ships or buy the minerals their children mine, they'd starve" is a complete abdication of responsibility for the role the demand for those minerals plays in their situation. They mine them because they can sell them, that's the whole point. If you remove the entities buying them, then there's no reason to mine them.
Until you can do that, offering 'stop buying' as a solution is a waste of time.
"Realistic" is determined entirely by the values of the overarching system. The fate of the people at the long tail of the supply lines isn't valued. That's the single, solitary reason that this shit is still happening. Change that, and the system will adapt. The mines will get better, or they will be replaced with other mines that do it properly.
Stop settling for what your corporate overlords tell you is doable. We can do anything as a species if we choose to, good or bad. Our history shows it. Industry has every reason to tell you it's impossible because they don't want to spend the money to insure supply lines are ethically handled.
If we can mine coal in the United States without children and with relative safety, they can mine Cobalt in the same damn way. Cobalt doesn't by virtue of being cobalt need to be pried from the Earth by children.
oh you didn't know? The blood of the children is what christens the cobalt such that it works in computers...
/sarcasm
Luke 17:1 Jesus said to his disciples: "Things that cause people to stumble are bound to come, but woe to anyone through whom they come."
Ideally, it is a dual solution of don't buy the unethical kind, and set up an alternate ethical supply chain to the same region so workers can switch to a better work place.
But, if the latter is not possible, one can at least help decrease the market for unethical cobalt by ceasing purchase.
Plus, it is not a matter of seeming morally superior. If one option is morally better than another, it should be chosen, regardless of the consequences.
So, for instance, if Jesus is correct, that it is immoral to be a path of scandal, then one should choose to not be a path of scandal, even if the state of the world otherwise remains unchanged (e.g. unethical cobalt mining continues).
In the case of rubber the big companies do provide better jobs for the families they employ than anything else, ensure the family gets modern medical care (as opposed to "witch doctor" care anyone not working for them gets), and the children do go to school and so have the ability to get a better job latter. The companies looks the other way in harvest season then families are taking their kids with them to work, so long as the kids are in school. Child labor for sure, but you can honestly argue that the children are better off despite that.
You can decide if you accept that as better or not, but it is a reasonable argument that child labor isn't always the worst possible.
Sadly I don't think in the case of cobalt the above applies.
The idea is that demand for documented cobalt will go up, prices for it will also go up, poorly-documented cobalt producers will have lower demand for their product and their profits will be harmed, the ones capable of fixing their shit so they can sell more-expensive documented cobalt will do so, relieving documented-cobalt supply, and when the dust settles cobalt will be a little more expensive but most of it will be documented.
This is basic policy-building how-to-make-the-world-less-shit using market forces for (old-school) conservatives stuff, and is the backbone of one of the most important & influential strains of political and economic thinking around. It's not remotely radical or unrealistic.
I don't really get how this is much harder or less practical for the state or states implementing the law than most laws governing corporate behavior, and particularly laws governing imports. Yes a law would have to be drafted, passed, and enforced. I don't think any part of that's particularly less reasonable or more unlikely than in the case of any similar law.
In short, you punish companies for either using conflict minerals or if you're unable to determine to a reasonable level of satisfaction that they are not using conflict minerals. Likely they'll want to make sure you can determine such, and will pressure their suppliers to make it happen, in the usual ways markets do things (suppliers that make it easy and do it right and develop a reputation for having few fine-inducing screw-ups can charge more, those that fail miserably at it may just go out of business and be replaced by others who aren't terrible at their job, pretty soon everything's a little more expensive but we have a decent idea of what comes from where)
The question isn't "have we completely stopped blood diamonds", the question is "have we lowered the demand for blood diamonds".
If the answer is yes, then the strategy is legitimate and worked. We may have more work to do, but the argument that we must wait for perfect before attempting to make improvements is asinine.
fuck that.
So... why is your moral compass so off?
Of course, that isn't the real purpose of governments or any other illegitimate authorities, so I won't hold my breath.
This is about stopping the exploitation of children. While you're trying to squabble over whether or not some random internet person is using a keyboard with cobalt in it, children are being forced down into these mines and risking their lives.
Get your priorities straight.
Sure they could. They would basically need to set up a modern version of the East India Trading Company, build themselves a mercenary army, and go in there and set up a proxy government that adheres to whatever regulatory policies they want to define.
We called that "colonialism" the last time around though, and most of the countries it happened to were not fans.
If you look at what the PRC is doing to establish footholds and reliable supply chains, it bears a strong resemblance to those old trading companies. The US does various "counter-terrorism" operations in different countries, essentially borrowing African military units.
In more ancient history, while the Spaniards did many horrible things to natives, they also put a stop to even greater horrors, such as the mass human sacrifice at that time.
Even further back, Roman colonization was exploitative, but did also bring peace to the different regions they colonized.
So, colonization can bring about a better social structure. Given that people are often driven by selfish gain, getting something out of enacting a just social structure seems to be the best way forward.
Q: But I'm asking you, is it possible that these companies can claim that you can't prove that they're actually linked to the cobalt?
A: Certainly the supply chain is opaque. It is complex. But the plaintiffs all were injured and killed at mines owned by companies that have been publicly disclosed as sellers of cobalt to our defendants.
What normally happens in this process is that the selling country's government official who is tasked with verifying the integrity of the receipt is bribed with a month or more salary to sign the exchange off as legitimate, e.g. the Kimberley Process. There has got to be a solution to this problem but paper trails are notoriously unreliable in scenarios like this one.
Most bribes are not obvious. More like give money to the charity my brother in law runs. The charity even does some good, but the real purpose is to pay the brother in law a nice salary and pay for family trips to various places the charity operates. (You should be suspicious anytime the family of a politician has any association with a charity - it might be a real charity but often it is a way to hide bribes)
The same cannot be said for the poor Cobalt miners, so no they can't just will that info into existence simply because they "want to know"
And if the mine is in the midst of a warzone and you can't be sure if they aren't using prisoners or children? Then find a different goddamn mine.
No. Not at all. It takes more than that to vet suppliers in a place as developed as China. If you think that's all it takes in an ACTIVE WAR ZONE you're delusional.
I agree. Err on the side of caution. If it "can't be done", it'll be figured out soon enough when trade is completely cut off.
No. It took thousands of years of civilizational development to even create the state capacity to do this sort of regulation in the developed world. It doesn't just magically happen through some invisible hand nonsense. Governance requires concerted effort by a sovereign government. The only way it gets done is by forcing stability and creating a government, which is a responsibility I don't think you want to put in the hands of FAANG and Samsung.
Unless you have a way to prevent demand for these minerals, there is not a known, effective solution to these problems.
That's the hard part of supply chain vetting: trying to ensure that your contractor isn't trying to pull the wool over your eyes. If you think "a plane trip and a few days of a couple people's time" is going to be sufficient to actually ensure that you're getting responsible cobalt, well, I have a bridge for you.
Up until a few years ago, Cobalt was specifically called out as being a problematic resource, with incomplete audits and widespread violations. Now, Apple claims to have this under control. Either Apple is lying or misguided, or the initiators of the lawsuit are.
Frankly, I wouldn't be surprised if the initiators of the lawsuit were wrong. It seems that Apple often gets lumped in with other tech companies' labor and supply practices, regardless of whether their specific policies are actually more strict than common industry practice (cf Mike Daisey's "The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs")
Disclaimer: I work for Apple, but don't shop for their Cobalt, so I have no firsthand knowledge of the actual situation.
Recently I heard that every person in a wealthy country effectively makes use of two slaves this way.
So these products being hard to track is no excuse. We should not allow the import of products where there's any uncertainty about their supply chain. Tech giants should have a responsibility to know where their minerals come from.
And this is not just about electronics or about the DRC. I think we shouldn't let our football teams play in Qatar stadiums built by slaves. We shouldn't be importing clothes made by child labour. We shouldn't be importing from countries that don't respect the rights of workers.
We're undermining our own freedom as well as our own economies by allowing this. We're indirectly abusing people in other countries, but we're also expecting out workers to compete with them. It's undermining everything we fought for over the past century.
There will always be uncertainty about the supply chain. That's the nature of the mineral trade AFAIK.
Also, if I agree with something, then it's free speech and therefore not grandstanding.
If you buy the logic behind the "resource curse", then reducing trade in such morally questionable resources could indirectly improve the state of the world.
...said the people opposing abolitionism.
Reality: to achieve moral progress, sometimes you need to eat an economic recession. Suck it up, buttercup.
I disagree with this. You shouldn't fail to emancipate some slaves just because you can't emancipate them all.
Not entirely true.
There are tools like SiliconExpert which track "conflict mineral issues" in the supply chain. This tool or others like it are used by the tech giants to screen their supply chain for this as well as other more mundane problems. It's a standard part of compliance engineering (https://www.siliconexpert.com/conflict-minerals-compliance-d...).
If a component/material gets flagged in a tool like that, it certainly is fair-game to go after a manufacturer & supplier for knowingly profiting at the expense of human rights. The penalties should be severe.
Yes, there's some uncertainty. But once exploitation becomes known, it's not THAT hard to trace it and stop at least the largest supply-chain users from using it without consequence.
> "the lengthy nature of its supply chain – as well as the nature of the refining process – makes it “difficult to track and trace these materials”. Apple illustrates this challenge by noting that its supply chain runs through “family-run mines, brokers, smelters, refiners, and commodity exchanges – before reaching a component or subcomponent manufacturer”"[1]
From Apple's 2018 conflict minerals report - "Apple has not, to date, been able to determine whether the reported incidents were connected to specific 3TG included in Apple’s products. The challenges with tracking specific mineral quantities through the supply chain continue to prevent the traceability of any specific mineral shipment through the entire manufacturing process."[2]
[1] https://hrbdf.org/case_studies/conflict-minerals/conflict_mi...
[2] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/320193/0001193125190...
Indeed. I have a good buddy who is inside council for a really visible guitar company. One of his main functions is tracking the provenance of any endangered hardwoods that go through the factory. From what I've been told there's a pretty big paper trail to document the date and place where "x" piece of Brazilian Rosewood or Ebony was harvested, but the penalty if they were to be caught building guitars from restricted or endangered wood is steep.
Maybe it wouldn't do much to dissuade the primary purchasers of cobalt, but a federal regulation popping them for a few million bucks for buying what essentially amounts to "blood diamonds" certainly wouldn't hurt the cause.
Let me see if I can put it into terms you can understand.
They prosecute people who look at child porn. Not because those people abused the children, but because those people create the demand that causes the producers to abuse children.
You decrease the demand, you decrease the abuse.
Or in another form.
If you really want to stop illegal immigration, you go after the people employing them, not the illegals themselves. We used to do this and it used to be effective.
There are an innumberable number of examples of going after the demand to affect the supply.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobalt#Applications
You’d literally make usage of an element illegal due to that. For me it sounds bit of an overreaction.
Also it would be more than tad unfair for the cobalt mines not in DRC to have to close up.
Find a better response.
But cobalt is just cobalt. You have no way of telling where it came from. Humans have faces, fingerprints and genes that allow us to have documentation that yes this person is a citizen and not an illegal immigrant, so you cannot use documentation for one person to slip by another that easily.
There is no such thing for cobalt. A document that states this 20 tons of cobalt is not dug up by kids applies just as well to a 20 tons that actually was dug up by kids.
That issue was with blood diamonds. A semilegit mine sold it’s own diamonds and blood diamonds as it’s own.
The idea is this: You forcibly change the demand to change the behavior of the producer. And there are plenty of examples of us doing this as a society (successfully).
How would you say Microsoft is able to recognize where the cobalt came from?
I can’t really see any way here that would not be a de facto ban for the whole material.
This is a solved problem. What you and other people are arguing is that it's not solved perfectly.
I don't really give a shit if it's solved perfectly. If we go from say 66% of cobalt being bloody down to 33% of cobalt being bloody. That's a win. We can, over time, learn and adjust to bring it down even further.
Perfect is the enemy of good.
Conflict diamonds and gold are a different market framework than electronics components though - those items in particular have much different and arguably more varied sales avenues that make them more difficult to stop. Electronics components have an inherent complex testing quality and fewer channels for markets to move through so should be easier to control on a regulatory basis.
Commodities, in general. They're fungible, so cobalt from one supplier looks like cobalt from another supplier.
I know because I worked on some of the accounting software they use.
Everyone is playing dirty. And I'm pretty sure they're going to play even dirtier in the future.
People don't like seeing how the sausage gets made, like the John Oliver segment on children making clothes, if they shut this down it will just pop up again with another company...
If you sampled 100 smartphone users on the street about cobalt procurement practices, would they be surprised by what they hear? If you tracked those 100 people, how many would change their behavior(i.e. give up their smartphone) after hearing about it?
You can't just pop up a new mine like you could a textile factory.
Again that points towards not just culpability (knowledge they are facilitating child exploitation and labor), but willing to go so far as to have their suppliers provide certifications they know are "often" fake.
>The question is how you, as a purchaser for Google or whatever, can actually catch the lie.
Plenty of other similar mining industries that exploited child labor have managed to put systems in place to minimize and weed out such practices. If De Beers diamond company can improve...certainly the big data tech companies can do better than requiring certs they know are often fake.
Global cobalt reserves by country:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/264930/global-cobalt-res...
I'm no fan of unenforceable laws that just push problems further out of sight, but I don't think that's the case here.
Instead of levelling skepticism at the lawsuit, why not level skepticism at the companies with a collective market cap of ~$2 trillion? Doesn't that seem more constructive?
There's a real failure of imagination in these comments. Working conditions can and have been improved by advocacy. Saying child labour is an inevitable outcome of capitalism is the same argument that was made by slave owners in the south and Industrialists in Britain at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. You're wrong.
In other words, it's quite possible that any, or even all, of those companies don't use DRC cobalt. I'll grant you that it's unlikely, particularly in Tesla's case, given how many batteries they produce.