Global Sourcing, Child Labor, and the Cosmetics Industry
A few weeks ago, Greenpeace shook up the shoe world when it revealed that leading footwear manufacturers may be using leather which originates from illegal cattle ranches in Brazil. Now, there’s news that yet another high-profile industry is having sourcing trouble. An article in The Sunday Times claims that cosmetics manufacturers are exploiting children as young as six to mine mica in India.
According to the article, girls in the Jharkhand state in eastern India spend 12-hours a day scouring stones in an open-cast mine, searching for enough mica to earn a paltry 50 rupees, the equivalent of $1. Ultimately, the mica is sold by traders to Europe, the U.S., and the Far East, where it becomes a key ingredient for the gold, bronze, and pearl effects found in certain lipsticks and eyeshadows.
The Sunday Times identifies Merck KGaA, the German-based pharmaceutical and chemical giant, as a buyer of some of the mica, and according to the article, Merck, to its credit, acknowledged that children were collecting mica in Jharkhand. Remarkably, however, the company then backed off from responsibility with a statement saying that its suppliers were “contractually required” not to employ children. What’s more, in a stunning example of incredibly poor supply chain risk management (not to mention bad PR), Merck added this: “Unfortunately, it is very difficult to monitor further along the supply chain, ie with regard to the collection of mica in remote areas, especially since these areas are considered not safe.”
Merck supplies cosmetic manufacturer S Black, which in turn sells mica products to a variety of global manufacturers, including Tesco, the UK’s largest supermarket chain. Tesco, which buys three mica-containing products from S Black, had a much more appropriate response when it learned of The Sunday Times’ investigation. “We take any allegation of poor labour standards within our supply chain very seriously — especially any suspicion of child labour — so as soon as we were made aware of these allegations we got in touch with our product suppliers and S Black and will investigate,” Tesco said.
