The heartbreaking truth behind the phone batteries

Many technology industry giants in the world have been accused of abusing child labor to exploit cobalt mines, materials that make Lithium batteries for smartphones.

The phones you use every day, open the back cover, you see the battery. Maybe you often complain, cursing that your battery runs out too fast, the battery is too bad. But have you ever tried to ask where those batteries came from?

Where do smartphone batteries come from?

"A lot of dust, it's easy to get sick here, we are all full of injuries".

This is shared by a 15-year-old child worker in the Republic of Congo, announced by Amnesty International, a nonprofit organization created to protect human rights. In that report, many world-famous technology companies, including technology village icons, were accused of abusing child labor and forced them to work in bad working conditions, only To exploit cobalt ore, make Lithium batteries.

Congo children must go into mines to exploit cobalt ore as Lithium batteries.

The report bears the name "This is what we die for", which exposes the cruelty in the cobalt mining industry. Children are forced to risk their health and life in exchange for wages of only $ 2 per working day. Currently there are about 40,000 child workers working in cobalt ore mines, offering their souls and their own lives to contribute to creating billions of dollars in profits for technology companies. It can be said that the technology giants are "riding" on the backs of every African child, holding a fishing rod, holding a racket, carrying the sacks of money to their pockets.

Each child worker receives 2 USD (about 40 thousand VND) per day to exploit cobalt ore.

Amnesty International and Afrewatch, another African human rights watchdog, have visited five southern cobalt mining mines in the period of April-May 2015. The Republic of Congo has a population of about 67 million and is one of the poorest countries in the world. In 2014, the World Bank ranked Congo second from top to bottom in the Human Development Index.

Half of the world's cobalt reserves come from Congo , 20% of them are manual mining. The pain here is that the people of Congo, who are already too poor, do not have enough food to wear their clothes, do not have the conditions to go to school, so they basically have no choice but to do so. health students go to mine ore. Children, because their families cannot take them to school, have to let their children help me to exploit cobalt. Some other families are better off, can let their children go to school, they only have to work on weekends.

Because of poverty, Congolese children are forced to work instead of going to school.

Working in these mines, those children suffer from high temperatures, drying their faces for rain and storms. Investigators have seen children only 7 years old, carrying each basket of ore weighing more than their weight. Many of them suffer from respiratory problems, others suffer from spinal defects due to heavy lifting and many other injuries. Particularly, the children were beaten by adults for their slow business.

"I went to the mines early in the morning and came back the next day. How much money we used to eat and drink, because we didn't eat at home," some young workers shared.

There were only 7-year-old children who had to carry metal bags heavier than their bodies.

In addition to respiratory and bone damage, child workers are also at risk for long-term exposure to cobalt ore. One of the deadly diseases is lung infection . Workers who are not equipped with protective gear, masks, and gloves, are also not trained on how to handle situations when they are in danger, so it is extremely common for workers to die when mining ores. turn. However, because the mine structure is too shabby, not every accident the number of corpses is also fully found, a large number of workers remains still inside, while outside, mining is still Just exploit, there is no big problem.

Congolese children risk their lives to make batteries for smart electronic devices of humankind.

Hundreds of millions of people around the world still enjoy modern and modern technology products every day, they never, or rarely ever wonder, the origin of those products. But they did not know that, somewhere in the world, children who were only 6 or 7 years old had to die or accept a short life, in exchange for a smart electronic device.

This is the time when major technology companies look back on their exploits, leaving a few of the huge profits invested in their employees, which are too hard to enrich them.