People already know that their phones are made using materials excavated in awful conditions, then built in awful conditions by minors in Asia and then sold at ludicrous prices around the world. The consensus seems to be (based on my observation) that no one really cares. We can keep on sharing those links to articles that stimulate the outrage for about 10 minutes, might keep social networks fuzzy for a few days, but in the end, it doesn't change anything.
Sweatshops still exist, kids are still being exploited.
Either people stop buying those goods (and that is NOT happening ever) or start buying green/human-friendly alternatives at 3 times the price for 1/10th of the quality or it will keep on keeping on.
It's sad, but it is a reality, as grim as it is.
> The consensus seems to be (based on my observation) that no one really cares.
I think it's more complex than that because most people realize that this phenomenon is not restricted to phones, so singling them out doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
It's suddenly not such a simple problem when you expand your view beyond a hot product like a smartphone and realize that a vast variety of products used in the US and other first-world countries are produced under exactly the same conditions. You can't blame a single product anymore, you can't blame a single company, and there's no simple action you can take to avoid contributing to the problem without being granted some sort of omniscience over the details of the global supply chain.
People are overwhelmed by the incredible complexity of the problem and are stalled into inactivity as a result.
Well, it's the same when there's a terrorist attack that kills 30 people but wait... the victims don't share our skin tone and also it is in country which name we'll forget in a week.
If it doesn't affect us directly or our money, we don't give a crap... except for keeping a nice social facade sharing the outrage as you said.
In a historic/anthropologic way maybe a big part of human progress is based on dehumanizing people and exploting them or the resources they have. Seems like as a society all is well if it affects "them" and not "us".
I have to ask though... would any of these people have better lives, young or old, than they would have without mining these materials? If they are kidnapped and forced into slave labor, that is not good, but if they work of their own accord and live better for it, then who am I to decide what their opportunities are.
> People already know that their phones are made using materials excavated in awful conditions
Do they? If the level of inquiry most consumers put into the materials and production methods used to manufacture / extract / havest their everyday purchases are any indication, I'd venture to guess that only a very small percentage of folks think about what goes in their digital device.
I'd like a source for the difference in price between electronic goods manufactured in the 1st world and in some sweatshop half-way around the world. Would it really be 3x more expensive?
I don't know where you get this idea that everybody are aware of this. And I do not understand how not doing anything could change something.
IMHO the only way we can have change is by doing something and the first step is raising awareness. It does work, for example foxconn has accelerated its move towards replacing employees by robots under public pressure.
Machinism which made child labor a work force competing with full grown men has been around for more than 150 years, the next step is replacing child operating machines by robotic machines.
We do care. I get really annoyed at this argument.
We cared so much about the welfare of our fellow man, that we passed laws ensuring that companies needed to run safe, healthy, ethical and environmentally friendly environments.
We did this despite the prospect of higher costs, because we cared.
Companies then moved their manufacturing (and mining!) to other countries, where they could continue to abuse the people and their environment in peace to ensure bigger profits for themselves.
Somehow this is now our fault again.
Tracking and maintaining a record of every single company whose goods we should avoid is HARD, and most of us already have too many things we need to do.
We have consistently indicated that we want our government to help us ensure that the goods we consume are produced ethically, safely and in an environmentally friendly way.
The problem is that there is no will at the government level to do this.
>People already know that their phones are made using materials excavated in awful conditions, then built in awful conditions by minors in Asia and then sold at ludicrous prices around the world. The consensus seems to be (based on my observation) that no one really cares.
Yep.
When I benefit from child abuse, it isn't a big deal. When someone else benefits from child abuse, then it is a horrible travesty. All the focus on the horrors of child exploitation of certain forms by those who benefit from child exploitation of other forms leaves a lot to be thought about.
Absolutely true. Perhaps we are not showing the videos and links to the right generation. From time to time I would show my kids what it takes to get that iPhone. The one covered in blings and awaiting its almost-annual upgrade...as grim as it gets.
"The 16 multinational companies covered in the report are Ahong, Apple, BYD, Daimler, Dell, HP, Huawei, Inventec, Lenovo, LG, Microsoft, Samsung, Sony, Vodafone, Volkswagen and ZTE. Company responses are available in the report annex."
"The largest [purchaser of Congolese-sourced cobalt] is Huayou Cobalt’s Congolese subsidiary CDM.
"Huayou Cobalt [then] supplies cobalt to three lithium-ion battery component manufacturers[:] Ningbo Shanshan and Tianjin Bamo from China[;] and L&F Materials from South Korea.
"[The] 16 multinational consumer brands listed [are] direct or indirect customers of the three battery component manufacturers."
(edit: Note I've rearranged the paragraphs from the original report.)
Maybe because Apple is the one named company that refused to comment.
"(Samsung) SDI, told Amnesty it doesn’t do direct business with the major Chinese suppliers mentioned in the report and that they aren’t in its supply chain."
From the article: "mobile-phone and laptop makers such as Apple Inc. and Samsung Electronics Co."
I'll up vote stories like this when they have the right title. Not one designed for clickbait. Apple goes further than most companies to inspect its supply chain and improve working conditions. So it grates to see Apple singled out for criticism here.
Our electronics are composed of so many modular elements that no single company can produce them all entirely. Not even Samsung.
It must be very difficult to track down all suppliers on the chain and control and monitor them. All while still making a profit (even for Apple).
So I expect the usual behavior here from Apple: Remain silent, listen to accusations first, prepare a good reply and take necessary actions.
Quite exemplary in my opinion.
What I don't inderstand about this outrage is, will the Apple declining go buy from this supplier actually change these children lives for the better or not?
This child labour happens not because of particular supplier, but because of economic situation in the whole country. If Apple switches from Congo mines to cobalt from more developed places, won't it just make Congo even more pure? Right now, these children work in mines because they need to survive; but if the mines close, doesn't it mean that these children will just loose the means to survive an end up being hungry instead?
(Please notice: I'm not making statements, I only ask questions. I don't know enough about this to assume anything.)
In case it's not widely known, take this as an opportunity to look at the FairPhone http://www.fairphone.com/ that seeks to address exactly this problem.
Reading the comments here, I'm surprised at how broadly the terrible situation in the Congo is being generalized. This is not one immorally-sourced component among many, it's a massive outlier: A rare element with its richest mineral source in one of the poorest, most chaotic and war-torn nations on the planet.
It's correspondingly an incredibly hard problem to solve. At an extreme, Apple probably has the cash to buy its own mines for cobalt but how can they ensure that their suppliers use it exclusively? It's a fungible commodity, after all.
If anyone has any ideas that don't revolve around armed 'humanitarian' intervention in the DRC, I'd love to hear them.
Also, I'd be interested to hear what problem #2 is if this one could be eliminated. My suspicion is that its degree of horribleness would be a significant drop-off.
Apple, Samsung, etc. are incredibly wealthy companies, making massive purchase orders. They are capable of impacting entire industries. They must ensure they have clean and ethical supply chains with no excuses. They could also force their competitors to do the same shifting focus away from the patent crap.
Instead of vilifying the corporate interest involved this needs to be resolved by trade restrictions at the national level.
Why is it that we only seek to shame the companies who buy goods produced in these countries but never our politicians who don't do anything to get the country involved to improve? Trade sanctions, freezing assets, and more, can get a country's leadership to act appropriately.
The most ironic thing here is that the current CEO of Apple is the guy who was so focused on the bottom line at Apple while Jobs was the running company, he forced many of the suppliers to guarantee certain production goals at insanely low labor rates to maximize profits.
If you want someone to demonize, you don't have to look very far.
Misleading title. Actual title is "Tech Giants Accused by Amnesty of Using Cobalt Dug by Children", and companies named are Apple, Samsung, Microsoft and SDI, because they buy from one dodgy Chinese cobalt company.
Apple, as other companies of such huge size with extremely complex supply chain, don't go too deep to inspect what their contractors do. They turn a blind eye, because it's all down to the matter if you can come up with an excuse and remain clean: "we don't know and physically can't check what all our sub-sub-contractors do, but we will no longer deal with them until they fix it" etc. Unless we have laws that hold all involved parties accountable, such practice will prevail.
In my opinion Apple seems to be going to reasonable lengths to keep its supply chain clean. I think you underestimate the challenge of making sure that suppliers 2, 3 or 4 levels apart from you play by the rules. I work at a small company that uses, among other things, fabrics in their supply chain and even at the second level it's very hard to confirm simple specifications that are much less interesting or scandalous than the topic at hand.
I wouldn't want to imagine how difficult it is to do the same thing when it comes to scandals and issues that the supplier of your supplier 3 levels deep actually really, really wants to hide.
And we happily buy their products absorbing their marketing message: "you are a creative and nice person that does good for the world (using our products, that is)".
And when faced with the reality that Apple is a money making machine and is only worried about doing a bad thing if it dirties its public image detracting from their marketing message our cognitive dissonance starts screeching.
So we, buyers of their products, are good people because they say their products are for good people, right?
Look at the thread and find the comments that say "they will remove the contractors, apologize and so they will return to being a good company, they are the best!".
Samsung sure is worst in their practices but at least they don't coat their public image with a hippy-happy-creative good natured coat. They are a ruthless asian electronics conglomerate behaving as such.
There isn't a complex consumer good that does not have at least one part of it that somehow was produced in circumstances that are abhorrent. This is something that is a societal - and even a global - issue, not one limited to specific brands, though there are brands that are more directly involved in these horrors.
And we all consist of sizeable chunk of carbon released from industrial age pollution, when slavery was an ordinary thing. So - how should I pay Amnesty International, or Greenpeace for acknowledging that my internal chemistry uses immoral carbon atoms?
worldwide enforced minimal labor and environmental standards is the only way to go. And like with war crimes and crimes against humanity such standards should be enforceable by any nation anywhere in the world.
Sigh.
Why are people even surprised? This won't change and can't change until we stop yelling "think of the children!" and only demanding for the suppliers to do a better job.
Yes some suppliers might be able to do a better job but many cases they also simply can't it's just the nature of doing business with under-developed countries.
Similar processes like the Kimberly process that was supposed to stop the trade in conflict diamonds have utterly failed and this is an industry that is built around artificial scarcity which just was dying for an excuse to further limit the production of diamonds to jack up the price.
There is very little any supplier can do to actually address this problem, this isn't some large scale mining operation that uses children this is for the most part unofficial mining.
Unofficial mining (AKA the official past time of small scale African warlords) is pretty much a bunch of people taking over abandoned mining sites, dump sites for mining waste, sites that were deemed to be uneconomical to develop or just being down stream from the actual mine.
While it's true that these sites are often taken over by some gang of former child soldiers and their master (we all liked Beasts of No Nation) more often than not these days unofficial mining is conducted by communities, villages, and individuals who do not hold any one at gun point.
These unofficial mining operations do not produce any substantial amount of note (individually, however there could be 1000's of small scale mining operations vs only a handful of large scale official ones which means that anywhere between 10-50% of a given product might be mined unofficially) but they do produce enough to say feed a village (or to buy the wanna be warlord a BMW from the 80's even diamonds are sold for not even cents on the dollar, every 1$ in uncut stones that ends up in the hands of the miner is inflated to 1000 to 10000 by the time it ends up at tiffany's).
Those unofficial mining operations are getting mixed with what the big actual mining operation produce and end up in the supply chain, this can happen at so many points that there is no way to enforce any process which will guarantee that the supply is clean of conflict, child labor or any other social decree.
Even if you take out the child labor part which while horrid is by far not the worse part that can happen to a child in Africa, the conditions in the official mining operations for registered adult miners are also appalling and so far beyond what most of us could even imagine human beings being able to withstand on a daily basis.
So instead of yelling that we should vote with our wallets until those supply chains will be clean we need to realize that they will never be clean as long as you are dealing with a region such as the Congo.
Instead of making another pointless process which will just going to be circumvented at all levels while jacking up the price for the end consumer (which every one in the supply chain, especially as it gets closer to the source will just pocket the difference).
Companies should put the money that consumers would end up paying into programs that might actually work and not into the endless pit of bribes that any certification process would turn out to be when facing the unmovable object which is reality.
Apple can switch a supplier and it will, but it won't find a clean one as no such supplier exists even if they'll find the most expensive one with the best intentions. Because the local population which runs these operations will always have the upper hand and as long as the conditions exist that make it more likely for children to end up digging up rare earths for your smartphone or diamonds for your tennis bracelet this won't change.
I hope the day would come where a company like Apple could be brave enough to come out and say look we can't buy Cobalt which wasn't mined by kids, but we made a calculation that if we could it would be 17% more expensive so we are jacking our own prices by 17% and transferring the difference to X Y and Z in hopes that in 20 years we could buy Cobalt which was not only not mined by children but also mined by miners with life expectancy which is longer than our yearly product cycle.
But as long as people would keep on yelling boycott this and boycott that it will never happen and the only thing Apple can do is to continue to play the pass the hot potato game with it's suppliers (which will continue to restructure and change names to be put back into that list) and maybe have Tim Cook do an apologetic we are the world cover...
[+] [-] VeejayRampay|10 years ago|reply
Sweatshops still exist, kids are still being exploited.
Either people stop buying those goods (and that is NOT happening ever) or start buying green/human-friendly alternatives at 3 times the price for 1/10th of the quality or it will keep on keeping on. It's sad, but it is a reality, as grim as it is.
[+] [-] nilkn|10 years ago|reply
I think it's more complex than that because most people realize that this phenomenon is not restricted to phones, so singling them out doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
It's suddenly not such a simple problem when you expand your view beyond a hot product like a smartphone and realize that a vast variety of products used in the US and other first-world countries are produced under exactly the same conditions. You can't blame a single product anymore, you can't blame a single company, and there's no simple action you can take to avoid contributing to the problem without being granted some sort of omniscience over the details of the global supply chain.
People are overwhelmed by the incredible complexity of the problem and are stalled into inactivity as a result.
[+] [-] derrida|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yomism|10 years ago|reply
If it doesn't affect us directly or our money, we don't give a crap... except for keeping a nice social facade sharing the outrage as you said.
In a historic/anthropologic way maybe a big part of human progress is based on dehumanizing people and exploting them or the resources they have. Seems like as a society all is well if it affects "them" and not "us".
[+] [-] ratsmack|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] skybrian|10 years ago|reply
http://www.apple.com/supplier-responsibility/
[+] [-] fucking_tragedy|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cpursley|10 years ago|reply
Do they? If the level of inquiry most consumers put into the materials and production methods used to manufacture / extract / havest their everyday purchases are any indication, I'd venture to guess that only a very small percentage of folks think about what goes in their digital device.
[+] [-] pervycreeper|10 years ago|reply
A slightly increased cost of raw materials would not have that impact, whatever you mean by that.
Apple stakeholders commenting on this story should disclose that, also. Lots of weird irrationality going on in these comments.
[+] [-] davidw|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blfr|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bigbugbag|10 years ago|reply
IMHO the only way we can have change is by doing something and the first step is raising awareness. It does work, for example foxconn has accelerated its move towards replacing employees by robots under public pressure.
Machinism which made child labor a work force competing with full grown men has been around for more than 150 years, the next step is replacing child operating machines by robotic machines.
[+] [-] bandushrew|10 years ago|reply
We cared so much about the welfare of our fellow man, that we passed laws ensuring that companies needed to run safe, healthy, ethical and environmentally friendly environments.
We did this despite the prospect of higher costs, because we cared.
Companies then moved their manufacturing (and mining!) to other countries, where they could continue to abuse the people and their environment in peace to ensure bigger profits for themselves.
Somehow this is now our fault again.
Tracking and maintaining a record of every single company whose goods we should avoid is HARD, and most of us already have too many things we need to do.
We have consistently indicated that we want our government to help us ensure that the goods we consume are produced ethically, safely and in an environmentally friendly way.
The problem is that there is no will at the government level to do this.
[+] [-] crncosta|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nsajko|10 years ago|reply
No, they don't.
[+] [-] Lawtonfogle|10 years ago|reply
Yep.
When I benefit from child abuse, it isn't a big deal. When someone else benefits from child abuse, then it is a horrible travesty. All the focus on the horrors of child exploitation of certain forms by those who benefit from child exploitation of other forms leaves a lot to be thought about.
[+] [-] chrischen|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iask|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] pluckytree|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] banku_brougham|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dennisgorelik|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ianstormtaylor|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Steko|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jt2190|10 years ago|reply
"The 16 multinational companies covered in the report are Ahong, Apple, BYD, Daimler, Dell, HP, Huawei, Inventec, Lenovo, LG, Microsoft, Samsung, Sony, Vodafone, Volkswagen and ZTE. Company responses are available in the report annex."
"The largest [purchaser of Congolese-sourced cobalt] is Huayou Cobalt’s Congolese subsidiary CDM.
"Huayou Cobalt [then] supplies cobalt to three lithium-ion battery component manufacturers[:] Ningbo Shanshan and Tianjin Bamo from China[;] and L&F Materials from South Korea.
"[The] 16 multinational consumer brands listed [are] direct or indirect customers of the three battery component manufacturers."
(edit: Note I've rearranged the paragraphs from the original report.)
[1] "This is what we die for: Human rights abuses in the Democratic Republic of the Congo power the global trade in cobalt." http://www.amnestyusa.org/research/reports/this-is-what-we-d...
[+] [-] twoodfin|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DrScump|10 years ago|reply
"(Samsung) SDI, told Amnesty it doesn’t do direct business with the major Chinese suppliers mentioned in the report and that they aren’t in its supply chain."
[+] [-] gm3dmo|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jjtheblunt|10 years ago|reply
And the subjunctive mode indicated by "may" usually evaluates to "is not" in new articles.
There's some "law" associated with that sensationalism news article observation, but I don't know its name offhand.
[+] [-] cbeach|10 years ago|reply
I'll up vote stories like this when they have the right title. Not one designed for clickbait. Apple goes further than most companies to inspect its supply chain and improve working conditions. So it grates to see Apple singled out for criticism here.
[+] [-] m_st|10 years ago|reply
So I expect the usual behavior here from Apple: Remain silent, listen to accusations first, prepare a good reply and take necessary actions. Quite exemplary in my opinion.
[+] [-] golergka|10 years ago|reply
This child labour happens not because of particular supplier, but because of economic situation in the whole country. If Apple switches from Congo mines to cobalt from more developed places, won't it just make Congo even more pure? Right now, these children work in mines because they need to survive; but if the mines close, doesn't it mean that these children will just loose the means to survive an end up being hungry instead?
(Please notice: I'm not making statements, I only ask questions. I don't know enough about this to assume anything.)
[+] [-] r0muald|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lenlorijn|10 years ago|reply
Full disclosure: I once worked on a part of FairPhone's webshop.
[+] [-] twoodfin|10 years ago|reply
It's correspondingly an incredibly hard problem to solve. At an extreme, Apple probably has the cash to buy its own mines for cobalt but how can they ensure that their suppliers use it exclusively? It's a fungible commodity, after all.
If anyone has any ideas that don't revolve around armed 'humanitarian' intervention in the DRC, I'd love to hear them.
Also, I'd be interested to hear what problem #2 is if this one could be eliminated. My suspicion is that its degree of horribleness would be a significant drop-off.
[+] [-] T-zex|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Shivetya|10 years ago|reply
Why is it that we only seek to shame the companies who buy goods produced in these countries but never our politicians who don't do anything to get the country involved to improve? Trade sanctions, freezing assets, and more, can get a country's leadership to act appropriately.
[+] [-] at-fates-hands|10 years ago|reply
If you want someone to demonize, you don't have to look very far.
[+] [-] davidgerard|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kbart|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thirdsun|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yomism|10 years ago|reply
And when faced with the reality that Apple is a money making machine and is only worried about doing a bad thing if it dirties its public image detracting from their marketing message our cognitive dissonance starts screeching.
So we, buyers of their products, are good people because they say their products are for good people, right?
Look at the thread and find the comments that say "they will remove the contractors, apologize and so they will return to being a good company, they are the best!".
Samsung sure is worst in their practices but at least they don't coat their public image with a hippy-happy-creative good natured coat. They are a ruthless asian electronics conglomerate behaving as such.
[+] [-] bigbugbag|10 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_in_the_Mobile
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1763194/
[+] [-] Polarity|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacquesm|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ommunist|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] daemonk|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] trhway|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dogma1138|10 years ago|reply
Yes some suppliers might be able to do a better job but many cases they also simply can't it's just the nature of doing business with under-developed countries.
Similar processes like the Kimberly process that was supposed to stop the trade in conflict diamonds have utterly failed and this is an industry that is built around artificial scarcity which just was dying for an excuse to further limit the production of diamonds to jack up the price.
There is very little any supplier can do to actually address this problem, this isn't some large scale mining operation that uses children this is for the most part unofficial mining. Unofficial mining (AKA the official past time of small scale African warlords) is pretty much a bunch of people taking over abandoned mining sites, dump sites for mining waste, sites that were deemed to be uneconomical to develop or just being down stream from the actual mine.
While it's true that these sites are often taken over by some gang of former child soldiers and their master (we all liked Beasts of No Nation) more often than not these days unofficial mining is conducted by communities, villages, and individuals who do not hold any one at gun point.
These unofficial mining operations do not produce any substantial amount of note (individually, however there could be 1000's of small scale mining operations vs only a handful of large scale official ones which means that anywhere between 10-50% of a given product might be mined unofficially) but they do produce enough to say feed a village (or to buy the wanna be warlord a BMW from the 80's even diamonds are sold for not even cents on the dollar, every 1$ in uncut stones that ends up in the hands of the miner is inflated to 1000 to 10000 by the time it ends up at tiffany's).
Those unofficial mining operations are getting mixed with what the big actual mining operation produce and end up in the supply chain, this can happen at so many points that there is no way to enforce any process which will guarantee that the supply is clean of conflict, child labor or any other social decree.
Even if you take out the child labor part which while horrid is by far not the worse part that can happen to a child in Africa, the conditions in the official mining operations for registered adult miners are also appalling and so far beyond what most of us could even imagine human beings being able to withstand on a daily basis.
So instead of yelling that we should vote with our wallets until those supply chains will be clean we need to realize that they will never be clean as long as you are dealing with a region such as the Congo. Instead of making another pointless process which will just going to be circumvented at all levels while jacking up the price for the end consumer (which every one in the supply chain, especially as it gets closer to the source will just pocket the difference). Companies should put the money that consumers would end up paying into programs that might actually work and not into the endless pit of bribes that any certification process would turn out to be when facing the unmovable object which is reality.
Apple can switch a supplier and it will, but it won't find a clean one as no such supplier exists even if they'll find the most expensive one with the best intentions. Because the local population which runs these operations will always have the upper hand and as long as the conditions exist that make it more likely for children to end up digging up rare earths for your smartphone or diamonds for your tennis bracelet this won't change.
I hope the day would come where a company like Apple could be brave enough to come out and say look we can't buy Cobalt which wasn't mined by kids, but we made a calculation that if we could it would be 17% more expensive so we are jacking our own prices by 17% and transferring the difference to X Y and Z in hopes that in 20 years we could buy Cobalt which was not only not mined by children but also mined by miners with life expectancy which is longer than our yearly product cycle.
But as long as people would keep on yelling boycott this and boycott that it will never happen and the only thing Apple can do is to continue to play the pass the hot potato game with it's suppliers (which will continue to restructure and change names to be put back into that list) and maybe have Tim Cook do an apologetic we are the world cover...
[+] [-] lez|10 years ago|reply