Inequality and Social Justice

Inequality can refer to both an imbalance of power and an imbalance of wealth. It can be seen that there are clear differences on a global a scale between the developing world and the developed world. Social justice is how these imbalances can somehow be remedied to ensure that the most marginalised people have access to the same goods, services and opportunities as their wealthier, more powerful counterparts.

Smartphones are modern tech gadgets that can produce imbalance in the ways in which they are made. Often, the materials that are sought for their manufacturing are extracted form the Third World or less-developed nations such as the Democratic Republic of Congo. This poor African nation hosts more than 70% of the world’s cobalt supply, an essential part of the construction of mobile phone batteries, their microchips and circuits. Often , this mineral is mined by poor workers who are reimbursed fractional amounts and left on the breadline of starvation with their country’s being pillaged in a colonial style fashion by more Western, advanced, developed nations who are the end users of the produced mobile phones.

The colonised nation ‘cannot properly develop, but remains trapped in a cycle of poverty and violence.’ (Taylor, 2023:65)

Colonialism and the remnants of Empire are built into the supply chain for the production of mobile phones and whereas now, slavery may have been abolished, in essence, as colonialism and enslavement are hard-wired into the fabric of Western developed nations’ politics, the continued pillaging of natural resources at the expense of poorly paid native workers is exploitation and reveals inequality and social injustice.

Carrying a mobile phone in your pocket and catching up on social media with your family and friends may seem an innocuous innocent pastime, but you are part of the chain and the consumer should not be averse to knowing about the suffering and injustices that result from the manufacture and supply of your advanced technological comfort gadget. 

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Taylor, D. (2023) in Redman, P.(2023) Global Challenges: social science in action 1. Milton Keynes, The Open University