Former ILAB Deputy Undersecretary Decries End of Programs
Thea Lee, head of the Bureau of International Labor Affairs during the Biden administration, complained that the tariff approach of the Trump administration ignores forced labor, and that the Department of Government Efficiency ended all the programs ILAB funded around the world. Those programs aimed to convince local societies to end child labor, to help foreign countries improve working conditions, and they funded research on the best ways to achieve these goals. The grants totaled more than $575 million, and some were scheduled to run through 2026, 2027 or 2028.
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Lee was speaking at a Politico event May 14 on how manufacturing is affected by the Trump administration's new policies.
The termination of the 69 programs is being challenged in court.
"So obviously, labor rights is what I've spent 30 years of my career working on, including stronger and more enforceable and sanctionable clauses in all of our trade agreements, on our preference programs, and I do think that remains a very important piece of what trade policy should do, because a lot of why American workers and businesses are disadvantaged in the global economy, is because we're competing with slave labor, we're competing with child labor," Lee said. "We're competing with workers who get fired or beaten up or murdered, or raising their voice and saying they need a pair of safety goggles."
Lee, who used to be the head of international trade for the AFL-CIO, argued, "There are some sectors where we don't produce, that we don't want to produce something anymore. So there's no point having a tariff there."
She said tariffs are useful tools, "like having a screwdriver in your toolbox, but if you take it, throw it through the plate glass window, you're no longer using that tool effectively."
She called Trump's approach to tariffs chaos, "and chaos isn't conducive to business, and it's not conducive to bringing jobs home, because in order to bring jobs home ... you need to tell the companies what the policy is going to be for the next five or 10 years, so that they can plan accordingly."