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Mining Child and Slave Labour/Prostitution – Historical and Current

Modern slavery: the true cost of cobalt mining (Hermes Investment Management – January 16, 2018)

https://www.hermes-investment.com

Investment capital permeates the global economy, underpinning businesses and supply chains across regions and industries. We believe that investors should not only be aware of the potential for their capital to generate returns but its impact on society and the environment. One such sustainability concern is cobalt mining.

Thousands of artisanal miners dig by hand in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Children, too. They have no industrial tools, no protective clothing, no hard hats, not even facemasks to shield toxic dust or shoes. They are searching for cobalt, the rare-earth metal powering the mobile revolution.

Cobalt is an essential component of rechargeable lithium-ion batteries. The end product may be in your pocket, on your desk, in your garage, or even in your investment portfolio. It powers most electronic gadgets, including smartphones and laptops, and electric vehicles.

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Norilsk, Stalin’s Siberian Hell, Thrives in Spite Of Hideous Legacy – by Robert G. Kaiser (Washington Post – August 29, 2001)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/

Is there any stranger human habitation on Earth than this?

In Norilsk, 200 miles above the Arctic Circle, the sun does not rise for three months a year, the winter temperatures remain under 30 degrees below zero, and the air is, literally, the dirtiest on the globe. Yet there is a full-blown city of 230,000 here, whose citizens are fierce local patriots with a romantic sense of their own uniqueness.

They live in a place created by zeks, political prisoners who populated Joseph Stalin’s gulag — perhaps 100,000, or even 200,000 died in its building; the exact number is lost or buried in still-sealed archives. They were inmates in an unimaginable chamber of horrors, a community of prison camps designed to create nickel and copper industries, and to kill people. It succeeded impressively on both counts.

Modern Norilsk is populated by descendants of those prisoners, among many others, and the city remembers its horrific past. This is unusual in Russia, where forgetting is easier. On the busy streets of Norilsk in August, with pretty women on parade and children chasing each other on bikes and in-line skates, that past seems so remote as to be unreachable.

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Exclusive – In search of sparkle: is corporate inaction on mica condemning Indian children to death? – by Nita Bhalla (Reuters U.S. – December 19, 2017)

https://www.reuters.com/

GIRIDIH, India (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Since 12-year-old Laxmi Kumari was buried alive in a mica mine eight months ago, her family’s grief has turned to despair on realizing promises by global companies to end child labor in the mines in eastern India have so far led to nothing.

Just over a year ago, a Thomson Reuters Foundation investigation found children in India were dying in the depths of crumbling, illegal mines for the prized mineral that puts the sparkle in make-up and car paint – but their deaths covered up.

The discovery that seven children had died in two months alone prompted pledges by multinationals sourcing mica from India to clean up their supply chains, and state authorities vowed to accelerate plans to legalize and regulate the sector.

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‘Cobalt for cobalt’s sake’: Electric vehicle boom changing the equation for a mining byproduct – by Geoff Zochodne (Financial Post – November 30, 2017)

http://business.financialpost.com/

Investors have renewed their interest in an historic Canadian cobalt play amid a recent boom brought on by the adoption of electric vehicles.

Toronto-based First Cobalt Corp. has seen its stock price double in value since announcing last week that it had received shareholder backing for a three-way merger with fellow juniors Cobaltech Mining Inc. and Cobalt One Ltd. The deal includes past-producing mines near Cobalt, Ont., a town named after the metal and located approximately 500 kilometres north of Toronto.

With its acquisitions expected to close in the coming week or so, First Cobalt says it now controls 45 per cent of the land in the so-called “Cobalt Camp,” in addition to owning the only permitted cobalt refinery on the continent that can produce battery-grade materials. While the camp is still in its exploratory stage, shares of First Cobalt are up nearly 280 per cent for the year, closing at $1.47 Wednesday.

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‘New era’: Canadian mining industry closely watching three civil cases alleging human rights abuses – by Douglas Quan (National Post – November 28, 2017)

http://nationalpost.com/

A trio of civil cases winding through the courts signal a breakthrough in efforts to hold Canadian-based mining companies accountable on home turf when they’re accused of violations abroad, human rights and legal observers say.

Historically, Canadian judges have been inclined to send such cases back to the jurisdictions where the alleged abuses occurred. But the three pending cases — two in British Columbia and one in Ontario — show that the legal landscape is shifting.

“Courts are now willing to hear these cases,” says Penelope Simons, a law professor at the University of Ottawa. “They’re not trying to punt them back to other places. That’s an important thing.”

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Cobalt Producer to Tackle Child Labor Concerns With Supply Probe – by Mark Burton (Bloomberg News – November 23, 2017)

https://www.bloomberg.com/

Chinese cobalt refiner Yantai Cash Industrial Co. will demand suppliers show that their raw materials aren’t produced with child labor after the London Metal Exchange set a deadline for companies that ship to its warehouses to spell out efforts to combat the problem.

Shandong-based Yantai is working with China’s Chamber of Commerce of Metals, Minerals and Chemicals Importers and Exporters, and shipping services firm RCF Capacity Planners to audit its supply chain, Liu Xiaohan, a manager at the company, said by phone. The producer delivered metal to LME warehouses after gaining an export license in June.

“They will help us set up a responsible supply chain system,” Liu said. ‘‘We are going to set up a code of conduct and we will ask our suppliers to clarify the source of raw materials we buy.”

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Vancouver mining company faces trial over slavery claims – by Ian Mulgrew (Vancouver Sun – November 21, 2017)

http://vancouversun.com/

Canadian companies have been put on notice by the B.C. Court of Appeal that they can be held accountable in the nation’s courts for human rights abuses committed in foreign countries.

In a ruling with wide implications, the three-justice division dismissed a B.C. firm’s attempts to block a suit by African workers who say they were forced to toil as slaves at a gold mine 60 per cent owned by Nevsun Resources Ltd. and 40 per cent by Eritrean state companies.

“It’s a very important win because it means the case can proceed and Nevsun will have to answer the case on the merits, meaning they are going to have to respond to the allegations they were complicit in the use of forced labour in the building of that mine,” explained Joe Fiorante, a lawyer who represented the refugees.

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Darker side of electric cars in spotlight – by Angela Jameson (The National – November 19, 2017)

https://www.thenational.ae/

While EV emissions are good news for the planet the materials used to produce them are rasing concerns

Momentum is fast building behind electric vehicles as countries round the world move to reduce use of petrol and diesel for transport. This summer France and the UK said they would ban combustion engines by 2040 and China has said it is studying such a move.

Volvo, now a Swedish-Chinese company, says every car it launches from 2019 will be either fully or partly electric. Volvo’s announcement this year was greeted as the first serious challenge to Tesla, the Californian electric car maker, from mainstream marques.

Analysts at UBS expect global sales of electric vehicles in 2025 to reach 14.2 million units, or 13.7 per cent of the total, compared with under 1 million units, or less than 1 per cent, in 2017.

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Apple leads way in tracing cobalt from Congo, Microsoft lags: Amnesty – by Eric Onstad (Reuters U.S. – November 12, 2017)

http://www.reuters.com/

LONDON (Reuters) – Apple is leading the way in tracing cobalt used in its electronics to ensure the metal has not been mined by children in Democratic Republic of Congo while Microsoft is lagging, Amnesty International said.

Microsoft disagreed with the pressure group’s conclusions published on Wednesday. Congo is by far the world’s biggest producer of cobalt, accounting for more than half of global supplies of the metal, a key ingredient in lithium-ion batteries.

Amnesty, however, says about a fifth of the country’s cobalt production is mined by hand by informal miners including children, often in dangerous conditions. Cobalt has shot to prominence in recent months and its price skyrocketed due to expected growth in demand for electric vehicles powered by lithium-ion batteries.

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The German Auto Industry’s Darkest Secrets – by Melanie Bergermann, Simon Book, Alexander Busch and Martin Seiwert (Handelsblatt Global – November 3, 2017)

https://global.handelsblatt.com/

German consumers purchasing a new electric car may be buying a few extras they didn’t reckon with – such as child labor, corruption and police brutality.

The young man shyly moves his T-shirt down over his belly, hiding the scars from the operation and the exit holes. His fellow South Africans call Mzoxolo Magidiwana, 24, “dead man walking” because he will never recover from the injuries he suffered when police opened fire on him and his fellow workers five years ago. Bullets tore into his stomach and his right arm no longer has any strength; nor can he walk properly anymore.

Mr. Magidiwana was one of the leaders of the 3,000 miners who went on strike on August 12, 2012 to protest poor working conditions and low pay at the Marikana platinum mine some 100 kilometers from Johannesburg in South Africa.

The workers were being paid just €400 ($464) per month for back breaking work. Below ground, they had to contend with constant accidents and dust that made them ill. Above ground, they were breathing the toxic fumes coming out of the platinum smelter.

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A Mining Billionaire Takes His War on Slavery to the UN – by Katie Robertson (Bloomberg News – September 21, 2017)

https://www.bloomberg.com/

Andrew Forrest walks up to CEOs and confronts them with the ugly truth: You may be a slaveholder. The Australian billionaire, who founded Fortescue Metals, one of the world’s largest iron ore producers, has spent years trying to convince anyone who will listen that slavery thrives in the modern world—and that they need to do something about it.

Since confronting the practice in his own company’s supply chain, Forrest has been on a mission to abolish forced labor and human trafficking. This year, he made it to the United Nations.

A special panel of world leaders addressing global slavery was chaired by U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May on Tuesday on the sidelines of the General Assembly and was attended by UN Secretary General António Guterres and senior White House adviser Ivanka Trump, among others.

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NEWS RELEASE: Taking action to prevent child and forced labour in the mining supply chain

OTTAWA, Sept. 18, 2017 /CNW/ – The Mining Association of Canada (MAC) today announced the addition of two new components to its Towards Sustainable Mining® (TSM®) initiative to contribute to global efforts in preventing the use of child and forced labour in the mining supply chain, and to provide the information needed to demonstrate the responsible sourcing of minerals and metals.

Despite the fact that Canada has rigorous legal measures in place to prevent child and forced labour, this action was undertaken because MAC’s TSM initiative has been expanding internationally. These additions to TSM build on the program’s commitment to continuously improve the social and environmental performance of the industry.

This work also responds to the needs of organizations such as the Electronic Industry Citizenship Coalition to ensure and demonstrate that such labour practices have no place in their supply chains. For example, Apple’s recently-updated Supplier Responsibility Standards included TSM, but noted that the program did not cover child or forced labour. This prompted MAC to take action to strengthen TSM in this important area.

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Is child labor the price for e-cars? – by Helle Jeppesen (Deutsche Welle – August 23, 2017)

http://www.dw.com/en/

Whether in cars, laptops or smartphones, cobalt is in nearly all batteries. The biggest supplier is the Democratic Republic of Congo, where human rights are often violated in the mines.

Young men, armed with only torchlight and tools climb down in a deep, dark hole, without helmet or security gear. The path becomes even smaller as they go further down in the unsecured tunnel. To remove the cobalt, the young miners use chisels and hand hooks and then place the gem rocks into bags, which are then pulled up by another miner above ground.

The rights group Amnesty International witnessed this scene during a research trip in Kasulu, the former Katanga province in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). These mine workers are known in the DRC as Creuseurs, loosely translated as the diggers.

The mining work is divided among everyone. Men dig for the rocks in the tunnel, women wash the rocks in the river, and children are tasked with separating the cobalt from the rock with their bare hands.

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Op-Ed Were the raw materials in your iPhone mined by children in inhumane conditions? – by Brian Merchant (Los Angeles Times – July 23, 2017)

http://www.latimes.com/

Brian Merchant, an editor at Motherboard, is the author of “The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone.”

Last year, I visited the sprawling mines of Cerro Rico, the “rich hill” that looms over Potosi, Bolivia. Four centuries ago, it supplied the silver that bankrolled the Spanish empire. Today, miners who work in the same tunnels as 16th century conscripted Incan laborers are providing tin for Apple products like the iPhone. It’s a powerful paradox — our most cutting-edge consumer devices are made from raw material obtained by methods barely advanced beyond colonial times.

Cerro Rico couldn’t be farther from Silicon Valley. Cigarette-scarred devil idols mark the mine entrances. Its support beams are split and cracked, and the air in the tunnels is thick with suffocating silica dust. According to a BBC report, the average lifespan of a Cerro Rico miner is 40 years. Worse, a UNICEF report found that children as young as 6 years old have worked in its tunnels.

Tin isn’t the only ingredient in an iPhone that’s obtained in ways that don’t quite match Apple’s “Supplier Code of Conduct,” which states that “all workers in our supply chain deserve a fair and ethical workplace.”

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Legalising North East India’s mica mines – by Heidi Vella (Mining Technology – July 17, 2017)

http://www.mining-technology.com/

Around 20,000 children work in North East India’s highly dangerous and illegal mica mines. The Indian Government has pledged to legalise these mines in order to protect a vital source of income for poverty stricken families, raise safety standards and put an end to child labour, which has already claimed many young lives; but will this strategy work?

It makes cars sparkle and eyeshadow shimmer. Yet, despite the glamourous hue it produces, how mica is collected is far from seductive. In 2015 and 2016, separate investigations by The Guardian and Thompson Reuters exposed terrible working conditions and child labour connected with the major mica producing states Bihar, Jharkhand, Rajasthan and Andhra Pradesh in North East India, where a quarter of the world’s mica is produced.

The Reuters investigation alone found that seven children had been killed in these mines within two months; some of their deaths covered up by the illegal mine operators which paid families for their silence. Further deaths have been recorded by the India-based NGO Save Childhood Movement.

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