In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, children as young as six descend hand-dug shafts that plunge 30 meters underground. They bag cobalt-rich rocks, drag them to the surface, and sell them to middlemen. Those middlemen eventually deliver the ore to subsidiaries of five American technology giants. On 15 December 2019, a federal class-action suit filed in Washington named Apple, Dell, Google, Microsoft, and Tesla as defendants.
The complaint, filed by the human-rights group International Rights Advocates, invokes the Trafficking Victims Protection Reimbursement Act. That 2008 statute allows foreign nationals to sue U.S. companies that profit from forced labor. The suit seeks damages and a medical fund for 14 Congolese families. Their children were killed or maimed mining the cobalt essential to lithium-ion batteries that power American laptops, phones, and electric cars.
At least six children died when tunnels caved in between 2014 and 2019, according to the 79-page filing. Others were left paralyzed or lost limbs after accidents or from carrying crushing loads. Wages ranged from two to three dollars a day. No safety gear was provided.
IRA lead counsel Terry Collingsworth said the companies had “specific knowledge” that their cobalt supply chains depend on cheap child labor. They continued ordering ever-larger shipments anyway. “These children were sacrificed so Americans could have cheaper phones and ‘green’ cars,” Collingsworth told reporters outside the courthouse.
The stakes are concrete. More than two-thirds of the world’s cobalt is mined in the DRC. The mineral is not a luxury input. It is the core component of the rechargeable batteries that run nearly every portable electronic device sold in the United States. Without cobalt, the lithium-ion battery does not work. Without that battery, there is no iPhone, no MacBook, no Pixel phone, no Surface tablet, no Tesla Model S. The entire American consumer electronics industry rests on a supply chain that, according to the suit, begins with child labor in unregulated tunnels.
The suit names five companies, but the logic of the complaint implicates the whole sector. If the plaintiffs win, every tech firm sourcing cobalt from the DRC faces potential liability. The Trafficking Victims Protection Reimbursement Act does not require proof that a company ordered child labor. It requires proof that the company profited from forced labor while knowing or should have known about it. The 79-page filing argues that the five defendants had that knowledge. It points to years of reporting by human-rights organizations, media investigations, and shareholder resolutions.
Collingsworth said the companies continued to order larger shipments despite that knowledge. The complaint describes a system where boys descend into unbraced shafts that collapse without warning. The bodies are buried. The families receive nothing. The cobalt enters the supply chain. It is refined, shipped, and assembled into batteries. Those batteries go into devices sold by the five defendants.
The case is still in its early stages. No trial date has been set. But the filing itself represents a direct legal challenge to a business model that has been documented for years. The question the suit poses is straightforward: how much does a company have to know before it is legally responsible for the deaths of children in its supply chain?
The families are not asking for an end to mining. They are asking for a medical fund and damages. The suit does not demand that the companies stop buying cobalt. It demands that they pay for the costs of the system they profit from.
That system runs on two-to-three-dollar-a-day wages, no safety gear, and tunnels that kill. The complaint names the companies. The families named their children. The court will decide the rest.
