Harvard professor and modern slavery expert Siddharth Kara is once again calling attention to a situation in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) that has been going on for way too long.
On December 22, Kara appeared as a guest on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, where he shared dramatic video footage of some 15,000 workers crowded into a cobalt pit in the DRC; digging with picks, shovels and their bare hands for $2 a day in extremely stone age conditions. The footage appears to fly in the face of claims from companies at the top of the supply chain (manufacturers of electric cars, smartphones and laptops) that these “artisanal mines” were abandoned years ago.
Several days later, Kara Tweeted a photo of a crowded cobalt mine with the message: “According to their Audits and Impact Reports this does not exist.”
Concerns about child labor and human rights abuses at cobalt mines in the DRC were first raised by Amnesty International back in 2016. Three years later, International Rights Advocates (IRA) filed a lawsuit against Apple, Google, Dell, Microsoft and Tesla on behalf of children who were killed or maimed while mining for cobalt in the DRC. The lawsuit marked the first legal challenge of its kind against tech companies that use cobalt in their lithium-ion batteries. The suit was dismissed in November of 2021 and has been appealed.
Kara insists that companies like Tesla, Apple, and Microsoft could “eliminate almost all indecent working conditions suffered by artisanal cobalt miners in the DRC” simply by raising retail prices less than 0.5%.
Microsoft’s lawyers, however, argue that the company “does not have a sufficient relationship [with] its suppliers to be responsible for what happens in the DRC cobalt mines,” IRA reports on its website. “These tech companies, which claim to be green, forward-looking, woke, and great places to work are merely taking a bloody page from the corporate playbook and hope that they can lie to consumers and claim the problem is solved because they have ‘policies’ against child labor while arguing in court that they merely buy cobalt and have no ability to control what goes on in the cobalt mines.”
Artisanal and small-scale mining is the only viable option for collecting cobalt across areas that have a variety of concentration levels, according to the Institute for Management Development (ISM).
In addition, most cobalt is exported to China for refining, which has made its origins difficult to trace. “By the time cobalt arrives at processing plants [in China], it has traveled thousands of miles and the sources of cobalt are obscured,” says the ISM.
But current blockchain technology can address these concerns. As we’ve previously noted, Some companies, such as BMW, have pioneered the use of blockchain, “…in purchasing to ensure the traceability of components and raw materials in multi-stage international supply chains.”
Swiss-based conglomerate Glencore PLC, which trades on the London Stock Exchange, is also a prominent player. The company co-founded the Fair Cobalt Alliance in August of 2020 and says it has “invested heavily in creating a zone of artisanal mines that would meet labor and safety standards.” But, according to Standard & Poor’s, “progress has been slow…”
In fact, a number of different non-governmental organizations have been created to address this complex problem over the years, with little progress.
It’s time for tech giants to step up to the plate, adopt currently available supply-chain monitoring technology and show how innovative they really are.