Modern Slaves Are Being Killed For Blue Gold. American Companies Should Stop Funding It.

Artisanal miners, without tools and safety gear, gather bags of “blue gold.” Photo courtesy of Afrewatch. 

Cobalt, also known as blue gold, is the shiny metallic base of a trillion-dollar supply chain that powers everything from phones and computers to electric cars and jet engines. The mineral’s ability to maintain energy density allows for the most powerful, stable, and long lasting battery on the market: the lithium-ion. But beneath the glittering Apple stores and Tesla showrooms is a dark underbelly of environmental destruction and human exploitation that has been called an example of abject slavery in the modern day. 

Cobalt is overwhelmingly concentrated in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which supplied 73% of the world’s cobalt in 2022 and is currently marred by violent conflicts and some of the most abhorrent labor practices in modern history. There is, of course, money to be made from such a blessing of natural resources: Congolese elites, Chinese mining conglomerates, and American multinational corporations have made every effort to do so. Still, no amount of blue gold can be worth the human toll this extractionary system has charged. The sheer volume of people affected and the severity of suffering is hard to fathom without boots on the ground, but try to picture this: Tens of thousands of child laborers; women with infants on their backs who make ends meet by going down into the mines alongside their husbands, enduring long hours in grueling conditions for hardly more than a dollar a day; poorly supported mines that collapse often, burying alive dozens and sometimes hundreds of people at a time. Injuries are a daily if not hourly occurrence, with people suffering broken bones, cancers, kidney ailments, and metal lung disease from the toxic cobalt dust they cannot avoid breathing in. All of this profound human suffering is tolerated to sustain the cobalt fix of developed countries. 

International knowledge about the situation is characteristically—perhaps intentionally—murky, but the last couple of years have witnessed a rising international outcry over human rights abuses and environmental destruction of the mining regions. The tricky question that activists face is that of moral responsibility at the end of the supply chain; to what extent can we hold Western companies that have multiple layers of separation from the Congo accountable for participating in this patently inhumane system? Indeed, to what extent are we, consumers at the receiving end of the supply chain, responsible for the abuse?

Satellite imagery of Kolwezi in 2017 and 2022, showing how constant expansion of mines is swallowing up land and natural resources in southeastern Congo. Images courtesy of Planet Labs PBC.

One group of seventeen Congolese miners, many of whom were forced into the industry as children, took a stance on this by suing five of the biggest American tech companies—Alphabet, Apple, Dell, Tesla, and Microsoft—in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. The families of these miners rested their case on the Trafficking Victim Protection Reauthorization Act (TVPRA), a 2008 law that punishes any group that “knowingly” participates in “a venture that engaged in trafficking crimes.” 

The miners made multiple arguments to convey that their labor was forced; anecdotes about employers placing workers who quit mines with the worst conditions on regional blacklists, and also showing how devastation of land by mines wiped out the fishing and agricultural industries. Through elimination of the industries which had previously thrived in the region, locals were thereby “forced” into the only available employment where they endured these horrid conditions at exploitatively low pay. The argument against Western companies through the TVPRA is staked on a claim that they knew this was occurring. But proving this is tricky because few outsiders have set foot in cobalt mines. Siddharth Kara, cobalt muckraker, emphasizes this as intentional when describing his being roughed up by militias in the mining regions: fearful of outsiders, he said they “demanded to see my phone to see if I was taking photos” because “they know there are people who are trying to figure out what’s the truth around here.” Murkiness of information was also mentioned in the lawsuit as miners complained Western companies use it “intentionally” as a crutch “to avoid formal association,” despite the fact that “everyone in the venture knows” there is foul play. 

While these miners endured horrid conditions and companies knew, the lack of clarity on exactly how much foul play and how closely companies were tied to it through a given supplier led to the case being dismissed this March. The court determined that the meaning of “venture” in the TVPRA meant relationships with “a common purpose, shared profits and risk, or control.” Apparently, this had to mean something more than a simple buying relationship. The court also ruled that “tech companies purchase an unspecified amount of cobalt from a supply chain originating in the DRC mines does not plausibly demonstrate” participation in such a venture.

While the facts of the case can make it feel as if the court adjudicated incorrectly, we should also recognize the fact that the TVPRA, as a piece of human trafficking legislation, does not cut to the core of the issue. At the heart of this is a moral contradiction between how the U.S. stakes its legitimacy for global governance and the realities of the global economy; it espouses idealistic commitments to egalitarian values and leverages these for its legitimacy as a “leader of the free world,” yet is utterly complicit and beneficiary to the backbreaking labor of people in Congo and elsewhere who live under the antithesis of that. Legislators must set explicit limits on the extractive dynamics of our supply chains. For example, it should also be bad to rely on cobalt to meet our climate goals through electric vehicles if the way we get them causes toxic waste, deforestation, and other destruction of natural ecosystems. 

Is this hypocrisy inevitable in our economic system? Is the prosperity of some humans, companies, and societies necessarily tied to the destruction of others? If we accept the moral imperative that atrocious labor practices in Congo cannot continue, and the environmental imperative that a green transition should not involve devastation of the natural ecosystems of our supply chains, then a clear (albeit unintuitive) answer emerges: the American government has to find a way to address what is occurring in Congo as a matter of domestic policy. This is not a neo-colonial, “white savior” call for outsiders to lead the charge and “fix” things in Congo. The Congolese people have agency and deserve to lead efforts with their wealth of local knowledge. Rather, the call for greater domestic accountability by America on the cobalt issue is a recognition that its companies and consumers have played a key role in fueling the problem: we must demand more of the multi-billion-dollar American corporations that sell the final products of this cobalt economy. It must be unacceptable to buy cobalt that has been stained by the blood of child labor, as well as the host of other abuses that occur in artisanal mines. 

In setting up an ethically sourced policy for cobalt and other key minerals which we rely on to drive the technological and green revolutions of this century, the following should be considered: making sure Western companies work exclusively with suppliers who pay miners a living wage. Then they can spare the burden of putting their wives and kids to work. Further there must be a general restructuring towards more humane working conditions, starting with protective equipment and an 8-hour work day. All of this will require significant improvements in transparency throughout the supply chains. This is a difficult task at the base where militias out of neighboring Rwanda as well as the interests of the Congolese government combine to make things murky through violence. For example Siddarth Kara reported of near death experiences in the mining regions by militias who were “roughing me up [and] kicking us around demanding to see my phone to see if I was taking photos,” because “they know there are people who are trying to figure out what’s the truth around here.” Yet the Chinese companies who process cobalt and Western manufacturers of final goods have significant leverage through the power of the purse, and they must use it to demand ethical and transparent supply chains. Otherwise money must be redirected towards emerging cobalt economies like Indonesia, Australia, and the Philippines. This is of course not in the financial interest of these companies, evident by the fact that they continue business as usual and avoid publicly disclosing what they know about their supply chains.

The extractive nature of this economy, by international interests at the expense of the Congolese people, should also be countered. It is ironic that one of the most crucial regions for the green transition hardly has electricity itself; The DRC has a 9% electrification rate, and about 0.3-0.4% in rural areas. Outside of the big cities, there is almost no public infrastructure to speak of. Investment in schools and health clinics is badly needed. World Bank data reports just 16% of Congolese people have access to basic sanitation. Child mortality is 12th worst in the world, and life expectancy is about 59 years. Is it too much to ask that American companies make investments in these areas? Siddharth Kara laments this would be a drop in the bucket, a mere “rounding error on the balance sheet.” Perhaps consumers would face a small markup so that exploitative dynamics are fully eradicated from the business relationships that provide their cobalt. At the very least, it would be a good way of paying gratitude for the cutting edge tech and relative prosperity we enjoy.

As the chief evangelist of liberal democracy and a country that aspires to be the leader of the free world, the United States must do more to clean up the cobalt supply chain in which its biggest and most powerful companies play a driving role. Policymakers must take up the task of drafting legislation that unequivocally addresses the problem of modern slavery, even if it comes at the expense of its blood-soaked coffers. If we do nothing, we tacitly accept a world where colonialism has merely transformed into neocolonialism and where the suffering is exponential. Siddharth Kara addresses this by drawing a powerful parallel to Joseph Conrad’s infamous 1906 book about colonial violence in Congo, Heart of Darkness. When King Leopold ruled the Congo a century ago, he enslaved the people in a brutal rubber economy to supply tires for the burgeoning automobile revolution. Now as we are in another automobile revolution in the twenty first century, Congo yet again sits on a critical ingredient for industrial success. Yet again it is being looted by foreign interests, and yet again its people suffer extreme abuse while the country reaps no reward. No more mothers and sons should be buried by their weight in blue gold, subject to the black irony that their only chance at a livelihood is likely to kill them. There must be another way.

Traolach O’Sullivan (CC ’24) is a history major and columnist for CPR. His main academic interests are in philosophy of history, housing policy, social justice, and the green transition.