Look at any of the things that we use everyday.

Many of these items come from slaves and cheap workers in countries away from our malls and supermarkets.

Children are stolen and separated from their families in the Congo, forced to stress their brittle bones and small bodies to mine the tin used in your iPhone.

Workers are abused, exploited, mistreated, and psychologically tortured in the factories of China to create the gadgets that we all use everyday.

Here, in the farms of West Africa, kids are trafficked and enslaved to work for Hershey, Mars, and Nestle, never to see their families again.



Picture a young child, taken away from his or her mother. Hear the shrieks of the family, as their daughter or son is taken away. That person is then forced to work in a sweatshop or farm, beat and humiliated daily by an over watcher. This still happens everyday around the world. It is eye-opening how in the most advanced period of human history, we still rely on slavery.



Let’s look at bottom of Apple’s supply chain. We find ourselves in the Indian island of Bangka. Children and Adults here excavate tin ore out of the ground with their bare hands. Here is twelve-year-old Rianto, working with his father at the bottom of a 70-foot cliff of sand. The boy told the reporters how he always worries about landslides. In these mines, workers can be buried alive by the walls of sand and wet mud that can cave in, crush, and suffocate them.

Much of the clothes that we wear comes from India. Many sweatshops here are staffed with kids much younger than the working age in the USA. Some have to mix toxic dye, causing the layers of their skin to slowly peel off because of the chemicals.

Let’s look into the factories in China. We see that people here work under extremely stressful conditions, face humiliation, are abused, and watch their co-workers slowly commit suicide, one by one.



An undercover reporter traveled to one of these factories and told us that: “Every time I got back to the dormitories, I wouldn’t want to move. Even if I was hungry I wouldn’t want to get up to eat. I just wanted to lie down and rest. I was unable to sleep at night because of the stress.”

Another reported had to work for eighteen days in a row, for around twelve hours each day and not given any breaks. This reached a total of 216 hours of work in just two and a half weeks. With these amount of work hours,it’s not hard to develop mental issues.

This might sound like another mind numbing math questions, but this is happening right now.

Ma Zishan is shown crying, as he carries a portrait of his son Ma Xiangqian; who recently committed suicide because of the stress in the factory. Another innocent life taken away because of our constant demand of electronics.



In the country of Mauritania, Moulkheir Mint Yarba returned from a day of taking care of the goats out near the Sahara Desert to find her daughter, not even old enough to crawl, left outside to die.

She wept while looking at her daughter’s lifeless face, her eyes open and covered in ants. The slave owner who raped Moulkheir to make the child, felt inclined to punish his slave. He told her she would work better without worrying about a child.

Weeping, Moulkheir asked if she could take a break to give her daughter a proper burial. Her owner’s reply, “Get back to work.”

“Her soul is a dog’s soul,” he said.

These are the people who work for us everyday. The people like you and I who make our devices, produce our foods, and die for it.

What can you do about this? You can start off by buying products labeled as “fair trade,” produced ethically.

Try to recycle and reuse. It will decrease the constant demand for new products, and hopefully, reduce the amount of work to make them.

Write an email or letter to companies which use slavery and unfair working conditions in foreign countries.

Send a letter to the White House. Presidents are known for responding to letters. Obama, for example read and responded to ten letters each day sent from Americans like us.

There are many ways in which you can contribute and help stop slavery and unfair working conditions around the world. And after reading this article, you can’t claim that you didn’t know.