Class Action Lawsuit Alleges Tech Giants 'Knowingly Benefiting' from Child Labor in DRC Cobalt Mines [UPDATE]
Last Updated on November 5, 2021
Doe et al. v. Apple Inc. et al.
Filed: December 15, 2019 ◆§ 1:19-cv-03737
A group of major tech companies faces a class action lawsuit that alleges they've knowingly benefitted from cobalt mined in part by children in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Case Updates
November 5, 2021 – Judge Dismisses Cobalt Mine Child Labor Case Against Apple, Google, Microsoft
The proposed class action detailed on this page was dismissed on November 2, 2021 by United States District Judge Carl J. Nichols, who found that the plaintiffs ultimately failed to allege they suffered any harm directly traceable to defendants Apple, Google, Microsoft, Dell and Tesla.
In a 33-page memorandum opinion, Judge Nichols, in deciding to grant the defendants’ joint motion to dismiss, stated that although the plaintiffs’ case described tragic events, it “suffer[ed] from several flaws,” including that the minors had no standing to bring their claims. Moreover, the 14 plaintiffs failed to adequately plead a violation of the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act (TVPRA) or any of the common law abuses they pursued, the judge relayed, noting that even if the plaintiffs had sufficiently accomplished the foregoing, it still might not have been enough for the lawsuit to proceed given where the alleged wrongdoing is said to have occurred.
“And even then, it is not obvious that the civil-remedy portion of the TVPRA applies extraterritorially—a fatal fact, as the alleged violations took place far from this country’s shores,” the opinion reads.
Judge Nichols’ memo states that the plaintiffs did not allege that any of the defendants employed any of the minors, or that the companies owned or operated any of the mining sites at which the individuals worked. Per the memo, the plaintiffs alleged that the harm they suffered came under the supervision of others, none of whom were named as a defendant in the case. The plaintiffs ultimately failed to adequately plead that the tech giants were in a “venture” with any of the other individuals or companies alleged to be responsible for the harm sustained at the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) cobalt mines, the memo says.
“The allegations here—which involve the actions of several independent third parties in the causal chain between Plaintiffs and Defendants—present an even more tenuous causal chain than in other recent cases that have been dismissed for lack of Article III standing,” Judge Nichols stated, relaying that the plaintiffs “pleaded no facts showing that every individual in the entire global supply chain—let alone one or more of the Defendants—controlled the mines or conditions” that led to their injuries.
Judge Nichols concluded the memo by acknowledging that although the plaintiffs have suffered terrible injuries in the DRC, they failed to plead sufficient facts for their case to proceed against the tech companies.
Washington D.C.’s International Rights Advocates (IRA) has filed a proposed class action lawsuit alleging Apple, Google, Microsoft, Dell and Tesla are “knowingly benefiting” from and “aiding and abetting” the use of young children in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) to mine cobalt, a vital component in the rechargeable lithium-ion battery found in many electronic devices.
The human rights and corporate accountability watchdog alleges in the 79-page complaint that many DRC children, some as young as six, are forced not only to work “full-time” in “extremely dangerous” jobs but are “regularly maimed and killed” by tunnel collapses and other hazards endemic to cobalt mining in the country. While describing the plaintiffs as representative of children forced by extreme poverty to leave school and become “artisanal” cobalt miners, the lawsuit includes numerous graphic images of young people who the IRA asserts have been maimed as a result of the “extremely primitive conditions” in which miners must work to meet the cobalt demands of tech giants such as the defendants.
According to the lawsuit, the modern tech boom has mirrored past generational treatment of the Congolese people in that a lineage of what the IRA calls “rapacious exploiters” turned to the Congo basin to meet their labor needs. As the lawsuit tells it, tech companies’ entrances into Congo to mine cobalt is adjacent to the colonial slave, ivory and latex trades that devastated the country’s people prior to the DRC’s independence in 1960. Even after the DRC gained independence, the suit continues, the Congolese people suffered through “some of the most corrupt leaders imaginable,” each of whom, the lawsuit says, “stole more than the last while the people of the DRC lived in extreme poverty.”
Despite the DRC’s richness in a number of the minerals needed for the manufacture of tech products, tin, copper, tungsten, gold and tantalum can be found in abundance elsewhere, the lawsuit states. According to the IRA, however, roughly “two-thirds” of the world’s cobalt supply comes from the DRC’s “copper belt” region of Haut-Katanga and Lualaba Provinces. It’s cobalt, the lawsuit argues, that’s brought upon the DRC “the latest wave of cruel exploitation” at the expense of “a population of powerless, starving Congolese people.”
Apple, Google parent company Alphabet, Dell, Microsoft and Tesla provide “substantial” support to the DRC’s so-called “artisanal” cobalt mining system, the case claims. The companies are alleged in the suit to know and have known “for a significant period of time” that the DRC’s cobalt mining operations were dependent on children working in overtly hazardous conditions for “paltry wages.” Rather than take meaningful action to address reported child cobalt mining in the DRC, however, the defendants, the proposed class action says, set up instead “voluntary programs” the IRA claims are meant to stop themselves from using prohibited child labor within their supply chains. This alone, the IRA argues, is indicative enough of the level of knowledge the complaint says the companies possess about child cobalt mining.
“The fact that these programs were announced is merely evidence that the companies know they have serious child labor and forced labor problems in their DRC supply chains for cobalt and they hoped that this minimal first step would postpone solving the problem,” the case reads.
Each of the pseudonymous plaintiffs who filed the complaint is alleged to have been severely injured in a childhood cobalt mining accident. The plaintiffs’ counsel asserts in the case that they and their research team comprised of child labor and human trafficking experts traveled independently to the DRC’s cobalt mining areas, where they photographed the conditions depicted in the complaint.
All told, the hundreds of billions of dollars generated by the defendants each year “would not be possible without cobalt mined in the DRC,” the IRA avers. The lawsuit alleges violations of the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, as well as claims of unjust enrichment, negligent supervision and intentional infliction of emotional distress.
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