Siddharth Kara was documenting children near Lake Malo, not far from the city of Kolwezi, when word came that a tunnel had collapsed barely 100 metres from where he stood. He ran to the site. Congolese soldiers had already blocked it off, and relatives were crowding in, wailing for news of survivors. Soon the toll was clear: 63 people were buried alive.
Kara, a public policy lecturer at Harvard Kennedy School, told CBC Radio’s As It Happens it was “one of the most haunting and painful days of all my research.” His years of fieldwork in Congolese cobalt mines are the foundation of a lawsuit filed in the US District Court in Washington, DC against five of the biggest names in technology.
The complaint
International Rights Advocates, a US-based human rights non-profit, filed the case on Sunday, 15 December 2019, for 14 families from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The defendants are Tesla, Apple, Alphabet (Google’s parent), Dell Technologies and Microsoft. The complaint accuses them of “knowingly benefiting from and aiding and abetting the cruel and brutal use of young children.” None of it has been tested in court.
Six of the 14 children were killed in tunnel collapses, the complaint says, and the others suffered life-altering injuries including paralysis. Photographs filed with the court show children with disfigured or missing limbs. Some were as young as six, pushed by family poverty to leave school for mines owned by Glencore, the British and Swiss mining company. Glencore has been accused of using child labour before. Some children were paid as little as $1.50 a day for six-day weeks, according to the filing.
Al Jazeera reported that it was the first time tech companies had faced legal action together over where their cobalt comes from. Cobalt is a key ingredient in rechargeable lithium-ion batteries. Terrence Collingsworth, a lawyer for the families, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation that the companies “have allowed children to be maimed and killed to get their cheap cobalt.”
Kara on pay, proof and cost
Children and adults alike earn between 80 cents and perhaps $2 a day, Kara said. He set that against the firms making the gadgets, which are worth hundreds of billions of dollars and in some cases more than a trillion. “I’ve never encountered or documented a more severe asymmetry in the allocation of income between the top of the supply chain and the bottom,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
The hard part of a case like this is tracing specific cobalt to specific products. Kara conceded the supply chain is “opaque” and “complex.” But he said the plaintiffs were injured or killed at mines owned by companies that have publicly disclosed selling cobalt to the defendants, and that the team would not have filed without definitive evidence. He also pointed out that two-thirds of the world’s cobalt comes from the Congo.
Glencore has said it does not tolerate child, forced or compulsory labour. Kara was dismissive: “what you say you tolerate and what’s actually happening on the ground are two different things.” Fixing conditions, he argued, would barely register for these companies. It would be “a rounding error on their income statements.”
Responses
Glencore said its cobalt in the DRC is a by-product of industrial copper production and its operations there do not buy or process any artisanally mined ore. Dell said it has “never knowingly sourced operations” using child labour and opened an investigation. Tesla, Apple, Google and Microsoft had not responded to Al Jazeera when it published.
The complaint argues that the five companies have the ability to overhaul their cobalt supply chains and make them safer.
Sources
- Tech giants sued over 'appalling' deaths of children who mine their cobalt | CBC Radio
- US tech giants sued over DRC cobalt mine child labour deaths
