Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives

by Siddharth Kara

I asked whether CHEMAF had considered offering the artisanal miners fixed wages as opposed to piece-rate wages. I suggested that doing so might provide workers with greater stability and a sense of security and that it might also prevent the artisanal miners from selling cobalt to external depots where they could be paid more, or more quickly. Sylvain responded that a fixed wage was not possible because of the fluctuations in the price of cobalt, a reasoning that I did not accept. Employees of industrial mines were paid fixed salaries that did not fluctuate based on the price of the underlying commodity, so why should artisanal miners be any different? Piece-rate wage systems by nature shifted market risks from mining companies to workers. Doing so placed substantial pressure on artisanal miners to dig themselves to the bone, take more risks, and bring their children into the mines to boost incomes.