{"id":7211,"date":"2019-12-17T11:01:09","date_gmt":"2019-12-17T08:01:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/africasustainabilitymatters.com\/?p=7211"},"modified":"2026-01-11T05:30:46","modified_gmt":"2026-01-11T05:30:46","slug":"tesla-apple-among-firms-accused-of-aiding-child-labor-in-africa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rayscohosting.best\/ASM\/2019\/12\/17\/tesla-apple-among-firms-accused-of-aiding-child-labor-in-africa\/","title":{"rendered":"Tesla, Apple Among Firms Accused of Aiding Child Labor in Africa"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"> <strong>By Matthew Lavietes<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">New York \u2014&nbsp;<em>Images in the court documents, filed in U.S. District Court in Washington D.C., showed children with disfigured or missing limbs<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Five of the world&#8217;s largest tech companies have been accused of being complicit in the death of children in Africa forced to mine cobalt, a metal used to make telephones and computers, in a landmark lawsuit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The legal complaint on behalf of 14 families from the Democratic Republic of Congo was filed on Sunday by International Rights Advocates, a U.S.-based human rights non-profit, against Tesla Inc, Apple Inc, Alphabet Inc, Microsoft Corp and Dell Technologies Inc..<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The companies were part of a system of forced labor that the families claimed led to the death and serious injury of their children, it said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">It marked the first time the tech industry jointly has faced legal action over the source of its cobalt.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Images in the court documents, filed in U.S. District Court in Washington D.C., showed children with disfigured or missing limbs.<ins><\/ins><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Six of the 14 children in the case were killed in tunnel collapses, and the others suffered life-altering injuries, including paralysis, it said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">&#8220;These companies &#8211; the richest companies in the world, these fancy gadget-making companies &#8211; have allowed children to be maimed and killed to get their cheap cobalt,&#8221; Terrence Collingsworth, an attorney representing the families, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Cobalt is essential in making rechargeable lithium batteries used in millions of products sold by the tech industry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">More than half of the world&#8217;s cobalt is produced in Congo.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Global demand for the metal is expected to increase at 7% to 13% annually over the next decade, according to a 2018 study by the European Commission.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><a href=\"https:\/\/allafrica.com\/stories\/201912170007.html\">Read more&#8230; <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>By Matthew Lavietes New York \u2014&nbsp;Images in the court documents, filed in U.S. District Court in Washington D.C., showed children with disfigured or missing limbs Five of the world&#8217;s largest&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":7212,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"content-type":"","pagelayer_contact_templates":[],"_pagelayer_content":"","_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[101],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7211","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-international-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rayscohosting.best\/ASM\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7211","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rayscohosting.best\/ASM\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rayscohosting.best\/ASM\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rayscohosting.best\/ASM\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rayscohosting.best\/ASM\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7211"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rayscohosting.best\/ASM\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7211\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rayscohosting.best\/ASM\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7212"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rayscohosting.best\/ASM\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7211"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rayscohosting.best\/ASM\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7211"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rayscohosting.best\/ASM\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7211"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}