Workers Are Dying in the EV Industry’s ‘Tainted’ City

After daybreak, the village of Labota begins to shudder with the roar of motorbikes. Thousands of riders in canary yellow helmets and dust-stained workwear pack its ramshackle, pothole-ridden main road, in places six or seven lanes wide, as it runs along the coast of Indonesia’s Banda Sea. The mass of traffic crawls toward the Indonesia Morowali Industrial Park, better known as IMIP, the world’s epicenter for nickel production.

“This is a tainted city,” says Sarida, a woman in her forties buying cough medicine at a roadside pharmacy. Only her eyes are visible; the rest wrapped in a face mask, hijab, and burqa. Behind her, a factory belches out brown plumes as thick as a skyscraper.

Sarida, who asked to not share her surname for privacy reasons, arrived in 2019 from Kalimantan, a region on the island of Borneo 800 kilometers to the west, after her husband got a job processing wastewater at a nickel company. “We will leave as soon as we can,” she adds, mounting her red Honda moped. “Before we have to be carried out.”

A decade ago, Labota was a fishing village; today it’s been subsumed into a sprawling city centered around IMIP, a $15 billion, 3,000-hectare industrial complex containing steelworks, coal power plants, and manganese processors, with its own airport and seaport. Built as a joint venture between Chinese and Indonesian industrial companies, it is at the heart of Indonesia’s push to supply the electric vehicle market with nickel, a core component of batteries.

Rocketing demand for electric vehicles, combined with supply disruptions caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, have made Indonesia—and IMIP—a critical link in the supply chains of EV manufacturers. That’s especially true for Tesla, which has signed multibillion-dollar deals with companies at the site and is reportedly in talks to set up its own manufacturing facility in the Southeast Asian country.

Meeting this demand has come at a huge social and environmental cost. Workers claim that deaths and injuries are common at IMIP. Medical professionals and environmentalists say the polluted air and water are causing respiratory problems, sickness, and eye injuries and destroying forests and fisheries. The rush to expand production has pushed local communities and infrastructure to the brink of collapse.

“Labor exploitation, economic injustices, and environmental degradation are undermining the socio-ecological transformation promised by electric vehicles,” says Pius Ginting, coauthor of a report by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation think tank on the industry. “The public needs to know the reality of what’s happening.”

Indonesia is home to the largest nickel deposits in the world, much of it found on Sulawesi, an equatorial island east of Borneo. Historically, nickel ore was shipped unprocessed, but around a decade ago, in an attempt to attract investment in heavy industries, the Indonesian government banned its export. Shortly before the ban took effect, in a ceremony attended by Chinese president Xi Jinping and Indonesia’s then president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, Chinese steel giant Tsingshan Holding Group, one of the world’s largest producers of nickel, signed a deal with Indonesian miner Bintang Delapan Group to build IMIP. Yudhoyono’s successor, Joko Widodo, has continued the industrialization drive, courting the EV industry in particular.

Nickel production in Indonesia more than doubled between 2020 and 2022, to 1.6 million tonnes, more than 48 percent of the world’s entire output. In April 2022, a consortium led by LG Energy Solution, the world’s second-largest EV battery manufacturer, signed a $9 billion contract with mining company PT Aneka Tamban and the Indonesia Battery Corporation. In August of the same year, Tesla agreed to a $5 billion deal with two Chinese companies working at IMIP, Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt and CNGR Advanced Material. Chinese companies have come to dominate the EV supply chain, buying up mines and processing facilities around the world.

As money poured in, IMIP grew. Today, the smog-shrouded coastline is a chaotic jumble of hulking loading cranes, giant industrial warehouses, rows of electricity pylons, clusters of tin huts, streams of traffic, and the odd patch of remaining forest.

“The face of this place has been utterly transformed,” says Imam Shofwan, head of research at the Indonesian nonprofit JATAM, who visited the region in September. “It’s become unrecognizable. It’s like a city was dropped in the middle of paradise.”

The local infrastructure was never intended to cope with such explosive growth. In Labota, shops, restaurants and homes are plagued by days-long electricity blackouts; phone networks and the internet often fail due to oversaturation. Workers live in grim, hastily-built boarding houses, several crammed into each room, with toilets that flow directly into open sewers.

“Everything goes to IMIP, and we have to live like dogs on scraps,” says the owner of one noodle restaurant that had been without electricity for two days, speaking on condition of anonymity. Back in 2015, she says, IMIP provided the local community with a share of its electricity. “Not anymore.”

Tens of thousands of people have migrated from other parts of the archipelago nation in search of a living. According to Indonesia’s Manpower Ministry, IMIP had 28,000 employees in 2019 and 43,000 in 2020. That number has now grown to around 66,000. There is no reliable data on the wider population, but locals estimate the number of internal migrants who have come to work in the service industry—from restaurants to phone shops and prostitution—is triple that number.

Yet, many who migrated here seeking a better life have instead found mediocre wages and sometimes deadly working conditions.

WIRED spoke to dozens of workers at IMIP, including five employed by Tesla’s supplier, PT Huayue Nickel Cobalt (HNC). Many of the workers arrived less than six months ago, and they describe working for up to 15 hours a day, earning less than $25—less than Indonesia’s median salary of around $30 a month. Some have not had a day off in three months.

Several say they suffer from breathing difficulties. One 18-year-old employee of HNC, who arrived three months ago from the Toraja region of Sulawesi, says that he receives around $15.75 a day. “Sometimes it’s hard to breathe,” he says. “I’m concerned, but I can’t do anything.”

These are not isolated cases. According to the Bahodopi Community Health Center, a regional clinic covering IMIP, 52 percent of patients last year came in suffering from acute respiratory infections. A number of nickel welders who spoke to WIRED reported eye pain, likely caused by particulates in the air, suggesting their safety gear was inadequate.

Vehicle crashes are common inside the complex, according to one employee of HNC who works in safety administration. An employee of Cahaya Smelter Indonesia (CSI), which refines nickel at the complex, says they witnessed a number of workers fall off buildings because their harnesses weren’t properly secured. While this story was being reported, one man working for the company PT Dexin Steel died after being electrocuted, according to a nurse at the IMIP health clinic. PT Dexin Steel didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Working conditions at IMIP are “dangerous and deadly,” according to Katsaing, regional head of the National Workers’ Union (SPN), which has 300 members across 11 companies at IMIP. “The health and safety regulations now are toothless,” says Katsaing, who like many Indonesians has only one name. “They are putting profits over people’s lives.”

In January 2022, a worker was killed after being struck on the head by an excavator while not wearing a helmet. In June, the operator of a bulldozer was swept into the sea by an avalanche while working a night shift without lighting.

Labor rights activists say that in its desire to bring investment into its nickel sector, the Indonesian government has weakened protections for workers. Last year, President Joko Widodo’s government pushed through a controversial “Omnibus Law on Job Creation,” after more than two years of constitutional and legal challenges, which relaxed environmental protections and workers’ rights. The government billed it as a way to attract foreign investment. Activists say that’s why the authorities are particularly keen to avoid a confrontation with Chinese companies, because of the billions of dollars they are pouring into Indonesia.

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