The Free Enterprise Project (FEP) at the National Center for Public Policy Research has submitted a shareholder resolution to Tesla. FEP, which owns shares in various companies to have the means of confronting companies face-to-face and bring attention to shareholders, wants Tesla to issue a report on the extent to which child labor may be involved in the manufacture of the company's electric vehicle (EV) batteries.
Even though Tesla claims that the company is investing more in human and legal resources than ever before to combat child labor in its supply lines, it has done little to provide shareholders with metrics and evidence that this project is actually coming to pass, an FEP news release says.
"In order to produce the batteries for these electric vehicles the minerals have to be basically mined in places that rely on child labor," says FEP Executive Director Stefan Padfield. "A lot of NGOs have looked into this, and so there's very serious concern."
The Congo, Nigeria, India and Colombia are among countries known to engage in child labor according to various sources, the U.S. Department of Labor among them.
AFN reached out to Tesla for comment and did not receive a response.
Padfield says "there is clearly a market for EVs," but adds the market has been distorted by a "utopian cost-benefit analysis" that ignores the critical issue of child labor.
FEP plans to present this proposal to Tesla's board at the company's next annual shareholder meeting on Nov. 6. This would give every Tesla shareholder the opportunity to vote on the proposal.
FEP also plans to publish a voting scorecard for Tesla shareholders as part of its Proxy Navigator voting guide.
