Items tagged with child labor
Apple, Samsung, and Sony are among a list of "major electronic brands" that Amnesty International, a human rights group, says failed to perform "basic checks to ensure that cobalt mined by child laborers has not been used in the their products." Specifically, cobalt is a critical material used in lithium-ion batteries. "The glamorous shop displays and marketing of state of the art technologies are a stark contrast to the children carrying bags of rocks, and miners in narrow man made tunnels risking permanent lung damage," said Mark Dummett, Business & Human Rights Researcher at Amnesty International. "Millions of people enjoy the benefits of new technologies but rarely ask how they are made....
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Apple has made available its "Apple Supplier Responsibility 2012 Progress Report" in which the Cupertino company claims it conducted a total of 229 audits, up 80 percent over 2010. More than 100 of those were performed at factories that Apple has never audited before. Facilities that were re-examined "consistently showed fewer violations," and most of them improved their audit scores year-over-year, the company said. That doesn't mean there wasn't any cause for concern. Many violations were still found, including a total of six active and 13 historical cases of underage labor at five facilities. "In each case, the facility had insufficient controls to verify age or detect false documentation,"...
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