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 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.
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...
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.
Sad that the courts are so slanted in the favor of corporate interests. Why do these cases get dismissed?
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
Glencore headquarters is in Switzerland
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.
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)
https://www.glencore.com/media-and-insights/news/Glencore-st...
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.
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.
Most people are willing to close their eyes as the issue is far away from home
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.
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
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.
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.
Commodities, in general. They're fungible, so cobalt from one supplier looks like cobalt from another supplier.
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.
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.
In contrast the end user has almost no information, so punishing them is both unfair and ineffective.
"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?
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.
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.
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?
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...
You can't just pop up a new mine like you could a textile factory.
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.
