Senate Forced Labor Hearing Witnesses Say More Input From CBP Needed

United States Fashion Industry Association President Julia Hughes testified that apparel manufacturers can feel confident their cutting and sewing operations do not include forced labor, but that determining whether the cotton in a garment came from Xinjiang is nearly impossible. “The growers who produce this cotton commonly sell to traders, or middlemen, who intermingle the crops of several farms and regions and send cotton to ginning facilities all over the world,” she said in written testimony.

However, she noted that the Labor Department awarded a $4 million grant to Verité for a pilot to trace cotton, yarn and textiles in India, and the same size grant to ELEVATE for a pilot to trace cotton supply chains in Pakistan and cobalt in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Witness Leonardo Bonanni, founder and CEO of Sourcemap, a company that offers software that analyzes supply chain companies' information to see if there is fraud in audits, or if there are patterns that would suggest the use of forced labor. Bonanni said Sourcemap is used by some of the largest companies in the U.S., responsible for tens of millions of dollars of imports, and that the software aims to trace back many tiers in the supply chain. “We never take the information that has been provided at face value,” he said.

Bonanni said that because Xinjiang is so opaque, his software cannot be used to clear operations in that part of western China. “Our customers will typically choose to vote with their feet and choose to source elsewhere,” he said. “Companies come to us in order to make completely certain they’re not buying anything from Xinjiang.” But he said there are 155 goods that are known to be made with forced labor or the worst forms of child labor, and this problem extends far beyond China.

Hughes, when asked about reports that it is not possible to do accurate audits of factories in Xinjiang, replied, “That’s why companies aren’t doing business in the region.” But she said importers want to know which companies are having shipments detained, so they know who the bad actors are. She said the value of shipments intercepted so far shows it's smaller companies that are responsible.

Human Trafficking Legal Center President Martina Vandenberg said some information does have to stay private, since these are potentially criminal investigations, but CBP could reveal how many detentions have been made under each withhold release order. She also said there's evidence that goods are being shipped to Canada before entering the U.S., so Canada needs to pass a ban on goods made with forced labor, too. The USMCA requires both Canada and Mexico to do so.

Bonanni said CBP should set a standard for the kind of data companies collect on their suppliers, and said that enforcing a withhold release order by looking at goods coming from that province is not particularly effective. “The bad actors will try to move the products to areas that are low risk,” he said.

Bonanni said the WROs implemented in the last year “sent a signal around the world,” and more companies are implementing methods of tracing deeper into their supply chains as a result. He said his software, that he designed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is not a panacea. But, he said, “One day every container arriving in the U.S. can have a clean bill of health.”

The other witness during the hearing was Joseph Wrona, a former worker at a silicon plant that closed more than a decade ago who said it could not compete after China created too much capacity in the sector. He referred to newspaper reports that forced labor is common in polysilicon production in Xinjiang, and said forced labor is the reason his plant closed, putting 100 people out of work. Wrona, who lives in Buffalo, New York, is still a union steelworker, and works in a tire plant. On forced labor, he said, “We talk and talk and talk about it and not a lot gets done about it. It needs to stop now.”