Rep. Jared Huffman, D-Calif., and Rep. Garret Graves, R-La., are co-sponsoring the Illegal Fishing and Forced Labor Prevention Act, which would require importers to provide more information on imported fish and shellfish at least 72 hours before entry, and require that all importers have an International Trade Fisheries Permit. It would expand the reach of the Seafood Import Monitoring Program at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which currently only covers 13 species particularly vulnerable to overfishing or fraud, to include all species within two years. If a SIMP audit found wrongdoing, the permit would be pulled.
A day after Mexico's Labor Department announced it would require a new union vote at a General Motors plant -- and that it referred the case to state authorities for a criminal investigation -- the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative announced it is asking Mexico to review whether workers at the GM factory in Silao were being denied labor rights. That makes the GM case the first for the new rapid response mechanism, since the Biden administration has not yet decided whether it will pursue the AFL-CIO complaint announced May 10.
U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai generally avoided being pinned down on timing as she was asked about rekindling trade negotiations with the United Kingdom and Kenya, the pause on tariffs on European imports, and a solution for steel overcapacity that could make way for the lifting of Section 232 tariffs.
Thea Lee, a former AFL-CIO trade economist and top official for 20 years, will be leading the Department of Labor's Bureau of International Labor Affairs, which is involved in both enforcement of the USMCA labor chapter and in investigating forced labor and the worst forms of child labor. The AFL-CIO reacted to the news of her appointment by saying “there is no better person to help strengthen enforcement of labor standards that increase the power of workers in the U.S. and around the world. She will also help shape policies to end forced labor and egregious worker rights violations throughout global supply chains.” The job is not one that requires Senate confirmation.
The first complaint under a new rapid response mechanism under USMCA, which targets a particular workplace, could take months to resolve, but even if the complaint is found valid, there will be no direct impact on exports from the auto parts factory this year.
Very few businesses testified at a live hearing May 6 on the tariff targets for the United Kingdom, Italy, Spain and Austria, in response to those countries' digital services taxes, but dozens of firms and trade groups submitted comments to the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative.
Uyghur Human Rights Project Board Chair Nury Turkel told the House Foreign Affairs Committee that his nonprofit wants swift passage of the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, which would create a rebuttable presumption that goods from China's Xinjiang province were made with forced labor. "The 11 current Withhold-release orders (WROs) are a wholly inadequate response to the gravity of the crimes, the harm to American workers whose wages are undercut by forced-labor competition, and the unwitting complicity of American consumers who buy face masks, hair weaves, cotton apparel, and solar panels produced by the forced labor of Muslim Uyghurs," he said in his prepared testimony.
One Democrat and one Republican from each chamber sent a letter to U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai, asking the administration to reexamine the decision to withdraw from the Trans-Pacific Partnership in 2017, a decision they called “misguided and short-sighted.” The May 5 letter, led by Sen. Tom Carper of Delaware, a close ally to President Joe Biden, also acknowledged that “there are significant political obstacles to negotiating an agreement to rejoin the TPP in its current form.” But Carper, Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, Rep. Stephanie Murphy, D-Fla., and Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., said there should be an effort to determine the best course for engagement with the countries that continued on without the U.S. to see how they could build on recent trade agreements.
The top Republican on the House Ways and Means Committee said he doesn't have a good sense of when the renewal of the Generalized System of Preferences benefits program or the Miscellaneous Tariff Bill could come up for a vote in the House, where the bills must originate. Rep. Kevin Brady, R-Texas, told International Trade Today during a May 6 press call that Senate Finance Committee ranking member Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, and Chairman Ron Wyden, D-Ore., are engaging about both programs, in the context of a China bill that committee is working on. “I think any discussion at this point is helpful,” he said. Brady said he thinks the two bills could move sooner if they were made a priority in the House, since they have both stood on their own in the past, and have passed under suspension rules or unanimous consent, which means they don't take up significant time on the legislative calendar.
CBP saw a record 38 million Type 86 entries in April, said Jim Swanson, CBP director-cargo and conveyance security and controls, who was speaking virtually to the National Customs Brokers & Forwarders Association of America conference on May 5. That's still not capturing the full scope of small packages that come into the U.S. under de minimis, which tops 600 million.