Trade Subcommittee Chairman, Other Dems Ask Administration to Investigate DR Forced Labor
House Ways and Means Trade Subcommittee Chairman Earl Blumenauer, D-Ore., and 14 other Democrats on the committee, are asking the administration to undertake a thorough investigation of the sugarcane harvest in the Dominican Republic, which uses many Haitian workers. That…
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
If your job depends on informed compliance, you need International Trade Today. Delivered every business day and available any time online, only International Trade Today helps you stay current on the increasingly complex international trade regulatory environment.
sugar is exported to the U.S., they said. "It has been more than ten years since a Dominican Republic-Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA-DR) labor submission requested the U.S. government investigate human trafficking, forced and child labor, hazardous working and living conditions, and other labor rights violations in the Dominican sugar industry," they said in a statement. "Despite attempts to address those problems, the recent [news] reports raise grave concerns of continued inhumane conditions that we simply cannot tolerate in our supply chains. We are eager to work with the Biden administration, which is renewing America’s commitment to human rights and labor fairness, to ensure that the United States is aggressively working to end to these outrageous, abusive practices.”