In the United States, a historic lawsuit against the likes of Apple, Google, Microsoft, Dell and Tesla has been filed over the deaths or severe injuries of several Congolese children while working in unsafe cobalt mines. These mines supply materials needed to produce batteries, found in products that we use everyday: mobile phones, computers, or even electric cars.

This modern day equivalent of slavery pays children as little as £1.50 ($2) per day to perform backbreaking tasks, putting their lives at risk just to support their families. The safety of these sites, found in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, is little to none, tunnel collapses are common, where some families report of never recovering the body of their child after they are buried alive; children are used like mules, carrying sacks of rocks out of the mines, risking broken limbs or even paralysis. These mining companies, supplying some of the biggest tech firms in the world, exploit and abuse the position these poverty-stricken families are in to keep prices low for manufacturing, in hopes that we, as consumers will never find out, while still charging extortionate prices for their products. This explicitly shows no consideration for the ethics behind manufacturing, but only caring about making as much profit as possible before they are forced to change, but now the time to change has come and is long overdue.

What is even worse is that in this lawsuit, several claims have been made that these tech companies were aware and had specific knowledge that the cobalt supplied for their batteries may have been acquired by child labour workers in unsafe conditions.

It is crucial that we, as the consumer must send the message to these tech companies which exploit the poverty in the DRC in order to acquire cobalt at a reduced cost that we do NOT want to have the blood of those already dead on our hands when we place an order with them. We all must stand together and show these companies that there is no place in the 21st century for unsafe conditions for any worker and child labour must be abolished entirely before more and more children die at the hands of our desire for technology.