House Expected to Vote on Uighur Forced Labor Bills This Week
The final forms of two bills addressing American commercial involvement with Uighur forced labor will be considered for votes this week, but the rewrites by the Rules Committee soften the impact on businesses, particularly in apparel and shoes. The Uighur Forced Labor Prevention Act now also has the disclosure bill incorporated into the language.
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The Forced Labor Prevention Act instructs the Forced Labor Enforcement Task Force to create a list of products made wholly or in part by involuntary labor in the Xinjiang region in China, and a list of businesses in the U.S. that sold those products. It also is to tell Congress how much more funding CBP needs for enforcement of the ban on imports of goods made with forced labor. The bill says all goods produced, even in part, in Xinjiang, will be deemed to be goods made by forced labor, and banned from import, unless the CBP commissioner “determines, by clear and convincing evidence, that any specific goods, wares, articles, or merchandise [from Xinjiang was] not produce[d] wholly or in part by convict labor, forced labor or indentured labor under penal sanctions.” The report is due within 120 days of passage.
The bill says the action is needed because “audits and efforts to vet products and supply chains in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region are unreliable due to the extent forced labor has been integrated into the regional economy, the mixing of involuntary labor with voluntary labor, [and] the inability of witnesses to speak freely about working conditions given heavy government surveillance and coercion.” That language was softened from saying audits were “not possible.” A Sept. 21 report in The Wall Street Journal said that Worldwide Responsible Accredited Production, Bureau Veritas and other third-party auditors will no longer conduct audits in Xinjiang. At a recent hearing on Xinjiang and forced labor (see 2009170029), Worker Rights Consortium Executive Director Scott Nova said several companies that were subject to withhold release orders from Xinjiang had received clean audits, including from Bureau Veritas.
The disclosure section of the bill, which requires disclosures on Xinjiang activity to be filed by public companies to the Securities and Exchange Commission, was edited to say that it does not cover activities related to “the import of manufactured goods, including electronics, food products, textiles, shoes and teas,” whether they originated in Xinjiang or contain materials sourced from Xinjiang.
Now this disclosure only applies to companies that knowingly engaged in an activity with a business that provides technology for mass surveillance in Xinjiang, or engages in activity with people or companies on the Entity List or under other sanctions related to human rights abuses there. It would apply to all imports, not just apparel, but the bill says cotton would be a priority sector.
American Apparel and Footwear Association Vice President for Policy Nate Herman said that the enforcement piece would create “a rebuttable presumption that any product that has any nexus with this region in China, Xinjiang, would be a product made with forced labor.”
Not only is this approach contrary to the due process usually afforded in U.S. law, AAFA believes it would be very difficult to enforce a blanket ban on all cotton coming from Xinjiang, even in goods that were sewn or knitted in other countries. “There are 13 billion cotton garments coming into the U.S.,” Herman said in a telephone interview. AAFA would prefer that the WRO approach stay as it is -- targeted to a specific company, where CBP has found evidence of forced labor -- but Herman said that if the bill were edited to say that imports made in Xinjiang are presumed to be made from forced labor, that would be workable.
Herman said it's not clear whether the bill could progress through the Senate this year, given all the things the Senate needs to get done, and the condensed calendar with politicians going home to campaign. If it were to move, it would have to be through unanimous consent, which is difficult. But, he said, “I think there’s a lot of pressure right now with the upcoming election for both Democrats and Republicans to demonstrate that they’re tough on China.”
What would make a vote less likely is if the Trump administration moves ahead on its own with a blanket withhold release order on Xinjiang goods, Herman said.