If you wear a gold ring on your finger, write with a gold-tipped fountain pen, or have gold in your portfolio, then chances are you're connected
to child labor in Africa.
Here's a disturbing article by Rukmini Callimachi and Bradley S. Kalpper of the Associated Press:
These hardscrabble miners include many thousands of children. They work long hours at often dangerous jobs in hundreds of primitive mines scattered through the West African bush. Some are as young as 4 years old. [...]
Wait - but surely you didn't buy any gold from Africa, right? Wrong.
Precisely which products contain child-mined gold, no one can say for sure. Unlike a diamond, gold does not keep its identity on its tortuous journey from mine to market. It passes through 10 or more hands. And when it is melted, usually several times, and mixed with gold from other sources, its address is effectively erased.
Jewelers and retailers that buy gold through UBS include Compagnie Financiere Richemont SA, the firm that makes Montblanc pens, Piaget's luxury watches and the jewelry of Cartier and Van Cleef & Arpels. Gold processed by Metalor has been used by these brands as well as in discount jewelry sold at Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and luxury jewelry sold by Tiffany & Co.
These companies expressed concern about child labor and frustration that they can't certify their products are free of it. Because bush mines, where child labor is ubiquitous, supply a fifth of the world's gold, the companies realize their supply lines may well be compromised.
(Photo: Rukmini Callimachi / AP)
It took several hundred years for our economy to evolve to the one we have. At some point those evolutionary points will happen to growing third world economies. Perhaps they will evolve slightly differently, perhaps not. But expecting other countries to subscribe to our economic standards when it took use centuries to get here is ludicrous. These things take time.
But it's repurposed, reccyled gold from http://www.brilliantearth.com/ One of the rings I bought also contains conflict free diamonds from Australia.
full disclosure: I do NOT work for brilliant earth and have no connection to them, I just love the 2 wedding rings I have bought from them.
Are they not to blame or can we even judge this society that we know very little about who might see even the impoverished lifestyles of the US as a step up in living standards
got gas? same deal
Eating?
And no, not necessarily. See also: child soldier.
You may as well blame Cecil Rhodes, for all that good it will do.
dirty gold.
dirty clothes.
dirty oil.
want it clean? stop complaining that prices are too high here. why are our product so cheap? why does wal mart exist? oh-- because we demand cheap-as-dirt prices. if we still had VALUE in the things we purchased as modern luxuries, poor people would not be able to buy the same things as rich people from their neighborhood department stores. it used to be that only rich people could show off their new flat-screen TVs and huge stereo systems. poor people idolized it, had to save their money, and were absolutely PROUD PROUD PROUD of their new toy when they brought it home. now that you can get a f*cking six-pack of TVs from costco, what's the point?
The same goes for diamonds, which I knew about long before the movie Blood Diamond.
If anyone is interested, I write more about this in my BLOOD DIAMOND review here:
http://jasoncollin.org/2007/01/28/blood-diamond-2006-review/
Guess what, you also support child labor in Africa. Of course the chocolate beans are coated in toxic pesticides which cripple the kiddies fingers too, so its even MORE EVIL than gold.
Truth be told if the 5 vaults DeBeers owned were opened for sales, the worth of the Diamond itself would be like to belly button lint, if it weren't the cost of the human lives lost in the mining of them.
DeBeers is the KKK of the world.
Ladies should think about who died in the pursuit of that piece of shit on their engagement ring.
it's a sad fact but... welcome to the world as we know it.
Stamp out the practice, and you send thousands of families into abject poverty and starvation, unless their family income can be supplemented by some other form of "child labour".
The on-site refining techniques using cyanide or (more usually) mercury presents significant health dangers to all participants, and many attempts to educate subsistence miners have had little effect.
Also, the lack of a "DNA" for gold is also complete bullshit - each local component of even highly refined .995 gold can be identified.
you cant possibly be that ignorant... not everyone in the world has the same luxuries as you do, not everyone has the chance to control their lives
IMO: American is the biggest offender. You don't have to look any further than US farms to see examples of this situation right here and now.