Trade Subcommittee Examines Practicality of Blanket WRO on Xinjiang Goods
Worker rights advocates, from non-governmental organizations and the AFL-CIO, say that the company-by-company withhold release orders on goods from Xinjiang are not enough to prevent goods made with forced labor from entering the U.S., while the head of a major apparel trade group said targeted enforcement is the only way to follow the evidence. They were all witnesses at a House Ways and Means Committee Trade Subcommittee hearing on enforcing the ban on the importation of goods made with forced labor from the Xinjiang region in China.
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Xinjiang, where up to a million Uighur Muslims have been placed in detention camps, is the source of most cotton yarn in China. Uighurs have been sent to factories in other parts of China by government authorities, as well. The forced labor ban's enforcement has improved since the passage of the Trade Facilitation and Trade Enforcement Act of 2015, but Trade Subcommittee Chairman Earl Blumenauer, D-Ore., said implementation of TFTEA “has been spotty, to say the least.”
He said that the announcement of five WROs on Xinjiang players this week (see 2009140017) was positive, but isn't close to addressing the scale of the problem. He did not explicitly say whether he supports legislation that would require a blanket ban on goods exported from Xinjiang, or goods with content from Xinjiang workers.
American Apparel and Footwear Association CEO Steve Lamar testified that while such legislation would make headlines, it would wreak havoc on supply chains and development in low-income Asian countries. “We don't have the capacity to enforce a blanket WRO,” he said, as there is no cost-effective way to find out where the cotton that's in a shirt comes from. He said that WROs and other sanctions need to be transparent, targeted and prospective, not retrospective.
Blumenauer said in his opening statement: “Just because supply chains are complex and this issue is difficult, does not mean we can shy away from making necessary changes.” After Lamar spoke, Blumenauer told him that the committee looks forward to working with him to find targeted solutions. Blumenauer asked the witnesses how effective a blanket ban on cotton grown in Turkmenistan had been. Students and workers there were pressed to work during the harvest, leading to the ban.
AFL-CIO International Department Director Cathy Feingold said that because CBP never disclosed what shipments it detained, it's impossible to know. She said CBP should maintain a public webpage with active investigations, not just announced WROs.
Worker Rights Consortium Executive Director Scott Nova said enforcement was thin to non-existent, and there were advertisements that goods for sale here contained cotton from Turkmenistan. There would need to be a much more aggressive effort by CBP if there were to be a regional WRO or legislation requiring a regional ban, he said. He agreed that CBP has to share more about its investigations and WROs.
Witnesses disagreed about the feasibility of corporations rooting out forced labor in their supply chains. Lamar said member companies have both uncovered forced labor and share that intelligence with CBP, but also have found Uighur employees that were not placed by “training schools,” something the Chinese government calls re-education camps.
Nova said that while companies would usually do audits to make sure their supply chains are clean, only an audit when workers can be candid without fear of reprisal can be effective. He said several recent WROs against apparel companies were in places where audit firms had given them clean bills of health.
He said that while some companies say they don't know where their cotton or cotton yarn comes from, he asserts that “brands that don’t know have chosen not to know. They do it when it suits their interest,” so that tariff benefits can be achieved under a free trade agreement. He said supply chains are optimized to procure inexpensive goods, produced quickly. If supply chain professionals were to put as much emphasis on preventing forced labor as they do on economizing, “we’d see fundamental change,” he said.
Amy Lehr, director of the Human Rights Initiative at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said most companies can only trace down to tier 2 suppliers, and tier 1 and tier 2 suppliers are often not where the problem lies.
It's not as simple as just refusing to work with factories in Xinjiang, or even with factories in China. Lamar, in his submitted testimony, noted that cotton grown in Xinjiang is 20% of the global supply, and that yarn made from that cotton could be sent to apparel factories in Bangladesh, Vietnam, Cambodia, Indonesia, Ethiopia or Kenya. He said it could be mixed with U.S. cotton, and used in Haiti or Central America.
But Nova focused on the most basic step -- refusing to contract with factories in Xinjiang. “Apparel brands have known for two years there’s widespread forced labor in the region,” he said, and that it's impossible to do normal due diligence to root it out. They could have already withdrawn from Xinjiang, and the fact that they haven't all done so is “why Congress is considering legislation.”
Witness Rushan Abbas, a Uighur-American whose sister was disappeared by the Chinese government 18 months ago, pointed to the recent WRO of human hair from Xinjiang, and asked, “How does this not pierce our conscience?” She is founder and executive director of Campaign for Uyghurs, which uses the alternative spelling of Uighurs.
“Continuing to do business as usual with China is unimaginable,” she said. “History will remember those who act and those who fail to do so.”