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!
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.
