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We hear a lot of talk about slavery and how bad American slavery was before the Civil War, but often turn a blind eye toward slavery in 2024 if it helps us get cheaper prices on things we want.
The majority of rare earth deposits are found in China and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). China currently controls nearly 60 percent of rare earths global production and 85 percent of processing capacity. According to a Human Rights Watch report, more than 15 percent of China’s production of the aluminum crucial to the manufacture of EVs comes from the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of China, where the Chinese government has detained approximately 1.8 million Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, and members of other Muslim minority groups through a system of mass internment camps where they are forced to perform slave labor.
Furthermore, the DRC operates the world’s largest cobalt mine, which produces 95,000 tons of cobalt, representing nearly 41 percent of the world’s total supply. The cobalt ore mined from the DRC is obtained through the use of exploitative child labor in dangerous mining conditions and eventually flows into the Chinese-dominated rare earths supply chain.
This problem has grown so large that concerns about the use of forced labor to extract components necessary for EV production prompted the federal government, with bipartisan support, to pass the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) in December 2021.
Despite the concern for this humanitarian crisis, the federal government and state governments continue to turn a blind eye to companies making these components for EVs while they push for transitioning all state and federal fleets to EVs for the sake of their net-zero goals.
Source: Will Arizona Stand Up Against Slave and Child Labor? – RedState
The very same reason the South used slave labor in the 1800s is the same reason that foreign countries are doing it now– the cheaper cost of goods. If our talk about how we are anti-slavery is to mean anything, shouldn’t we be refusing to buy things derived from slave labor? Or maybe we should change our stance?
