Mechanization makes sense in much of the world because there is a high up front cost, but the ongoing costs are dominated by energy and maintenance costs. If those costs are higher than the general labor cost then why would you mechanize?
Congo has been dominated by civil war for a long time, that generally depresses the cost of labor.
I'm a mining engineer. If a western company has a choice between using manual labour and mechanised they will choose mechanised because it is cheaper, faster and more reliable. They don't care what the law is, because human mining is barely competitive even at small scales.
Yes, it is a fact that there is child labour is used in some third world mines. I'm observing that it doesn't make sense to me that it is large-scale, because it only makes sense if the margins are huge, the volumes physically small and if there is an impoverished workforce.
If Apple is going to negotiate with someone directly, it doesn't make sense to me that that someone using child labour, because purely economically they shouldn't be cost effective. They would be a marginal, higher-cost producer. Isn't there a more cost-effective producer that Apple could negotiate with?
If there is a situation where human labour is cost effective at a scale Apple finds interesting, I am professionally curious because I didn't expect it to be possible. Hence a request for links. Even before negotiating, are their suppliers of serious quantities of cobalt that use human labour?
Why do you assume that? It seems to be not the case for cobalt: https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/business/batteries/c...
Mechanization makes sense in much of the world because there is a high up front cost, but the ongoing costs are dominated by energy and maintenance costs. If those costs are higher than the general labor cost then why would you mechanize?
Congo has been dominated by civil war for a long time, that generally depresses the cost of labor.