The Future Will Be Made of Copper…

Abstract

FOCUS | INDUSTRY 4.0 13 25/3 | International Union Rights | Mobile devices, sensors, screens, chips, and robots… do not fall out of the sky. Much of the debate on labour and Industry 4.0 has centred on the application of new technologies across the labour market. Somewhat less attention is paid to the production of these technologies – and still less their dependence on the extraction of certain raw materials. The electronics sector is increasingly linked to highly exploitative working conditions and practices, and significant risks of modern slavery in its supply chains. One recent report describes forced labour as the ‘backbone’ of global electronics manufacturing1. In respect of its raw material inputs, companies appear more or less indifferent to where and how these are sourced. In 2016, the Australian Behind the Barcode project ranked fifty-six electronics companies ‘on the strength of their labour rights management systems to mitigate the risk of forced labour, child labour and exploitation in the supply chain’2. One table in the report illustrates these companies’ scores at the point of raw material extraction: it is block red. Universally, the companies failed on questions of traceability, monitoring and labour standards. Not one company could guarantee a living wage, not one had a child labour policy, no collective bargaining agreement was recorded, and none reported that they based sourcing decisions on supplier labour conditions. Of the fifty-six, only one company achieves a ‘partial’ tick, for having at least a pilot labour grievance mechanism in operation in the extraction part of its supply line. The Raw Materials of a Revolution The mass expansion of technologies heralded under the title ‘Industry 4.0’ will clearly require a massive growth in mineral extraction. It is little surprise that the extraction needed for these technologies will take place in the Global South. According to some estimates, by 2035 demand for rare earths will increase three-fold, for lithium fourfold3. Cobalt demand will rise to more than twenty times its current rate, and copper more than forty-times. Others predict that global copper demand may grow by over 300% until 2050. The massive growth in industrial demand for the raw materials that new technologies will require is bound to have social and environmental costs. Does Industry 4.0 simply spell a new ‘resource curse’ for countries rich in these raw materials? What impact will the growth in demand have on labour conditions already prevailing in the supply chains of these goods? Discussions about ‘Industry 4.0’ could do well to heed the examples of the first industrial revolution. Industry 4.0 is deeply rooted in that revolution: the digital genealogy of machine code can be traced back to the Jacquard loom. Technology was central to Britain’s rapid industrialisation, and to the rise of cotton in textile production, replacing wool due to the advantages of newly mechanised cotton processing. By the middle of the 19th Century, cotton represented one tenth of all British capital investment and accounted for almost one half of British exports. A quarter of the British population was dependent on the cotton trade for their livelihoods4. This relatively arbitrary technological advance also contributed significantly to the economic ascendency of the United States. The ‘prototype machine industry’ massively increased the demand for raw cotton from planters in the Caribbean and the Americas. Imports to Britain grew eightfold between 1780 and 1800. Mechanised spinning therefore created ‘rising demand for raw cotton resulting in the extension of the slave plantation system’5. Questions about labour rights and Industry 4.0 should require us to think about how different workers’ rights are differently impacted, including in the electronics supply chain. In the first industrial revolution, technology had variable impacts on existing labour practices. The introduction of weaving machines into British textile factories dealt a deathblow to the guild system of skilled craft workers and the economic relations that went with it. On the cotton plantations however, the late eighteenth century invention of the cotton gin reduced the labour required to remove seeds, but this efficiency gain only provoked a massive expansion of US cotton planting and with it the intensification – rather than any reduction – of slave labour. And for its importers...