Choosing to remain blind is a very human coping mechanism.Ĭompanies may be doing the same thing. People remain willfully ignorant because information about ethical attributes can be laden with negative emotion and difficult to process. For example, one study found that if consumers have a product’s ethical information right in front of them (e.g., whether it was made using child labor), they will factor the information into their decision making - but they will not go out of their way to seek it out. Our research has shown that willful ignorance is prevalent in consumer contexts. If companies really care about human rights as they claim to, then why are reports of unethical behavior within supply chains still so commonplace? One possibility that we have studied revolves around willful ignorance: while companies do care about the ethics of their operations, they’re not actively investigating their supply chains to seek out this information. “The world’s getting smaller and companies have a responsibility to assure that these human rights abuses aren’t taking place.” “In this day and age, it’s not that complicated to work out whether human rights abuses are involved in the sourcing of products on the other side of the world,” said Mark Dummett, business and human rights researcher at Amnesty International. Is it truly impossible for these companies to determine the source of their raw materials and whether those materials were acquired ethically? Even if it is, couldn’t they work with suppliers to make this information more transparent in the future? More diligence is possible. Daimler said the same, claiming it is unable to verify such information “due to the high complexity of automotive supply chains.” Samsung SDI, which supplies batteries to both Samsung and Apple, also said determining whether its cobalt is mined in the DRC is impossible. In conducting the report, Amnesty International reached out to the implicated companies to ask about child labor in their supply chains and received a common response: Apple and Microsoft said they are unable to verify whether their products use cobalt from the DRC. It discovered that child labor is being used in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) to mine cobalt, an element that is used to make lithium-ion batteries found in many tech devices. Yet a recent report by Amnesty International uncovered a number of cases of child labor among suppliers linked to major technology companies, including Apple, Samsung, and Microsoft, as well as to several automotive manufactures, such as Volkswagen and Daimler AG. Samsung has said that its contracts with any supplier found to use child labor will be terminated immediately. For example, Apple says that whenever it finds an underage worker in its supply chain, it sends the child home safely, continues paying his or her wages, and even finances the child’s education and offers employment once doing so is legal. Many companies claim to adhere to strict policies about child labor.
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