The leader of the House Ways and Means Trade Subcommittee focused on making it easier for domestic industry to win antidumping and countervailing duty cases and said that the de minimis statute needs to be altered, in a hearing designed to talk about how Chinese practices damage workers, businesses and the environment.
The National Defense Authorization Act, a must-pass bill, hasn't gone to the Senate floor due to disagreement over an amendment to include the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act. Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said that Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., the sponsor of that amendment, is the only reason the NDAA can't go to the floor.
House Ways and Means Trade Subcommittee Chairman Earl Blumenauer, D-Ore., said the $800 de minimis threshold amounts to a huge loophole, and he's going to propose major changes to the law. He said that millions of packages a day enter the U.S. under de minimis, and "nobody's monitoring it. We don't know what's forced labor, what has circumvented intellectual property, counterfeit goods, drugs. CBP's getting better, but who can monitor millions of packages a day?"
Indiana Republican Sen. Todd Young, who co-led the Endless Frontier bill with Majority Leader Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, said he hopes to learn more soon about when conferees might be named to negotiate a compromise between the House and the Senate approaches to a China package. "I'm supposed to huddle up with Sen. Schumer today. I need to approach him. I have not had an opportunity to personally chat with him about the state of things," Young said in a brief hallway interview Nov. 30.
More than $14 billion worth of Chinese raw cotton and cotton and cotton blend textiles was exported in 2019 from five major textile companies with ties to Xinjiang forced labor, according to a recent British study, conducted with the help of international scholars and Chinese reviewers and partly funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). The study, called "Laundering Cotton: How Xinjiang Cotton is Obscured in International Supply Chains," analyzed shipping data from Bangladesh, Vietnam, India, Cambodia, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Pakistan, Kenya, Ethiopia and the U.S., tracing how goods went from China to one of those countries directly, or from China to Hong Kong to the foreign factory location, and then from there, to U.S. shelves.
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Sen. Marco Rubio's attempt to get the Senate version of the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act appended to the National Defense Authorization Act was rejected by the Armed Services Committee chairman. But the House and Senate will likely try to get on the same page on how to change the burden of proof for forced labor content in Xinjiang products through a separate conference committee dealing with the Senate's China package and House efforts to address China.
The China package passed by the Senate -- which includes instructions to reopen Section 301 tariff exclusion applications, and a renewal of both the Generalized System of Preferences benefits program and the Miscellaneous Tariff Bill -- will go to a conference committee to reconcile the Senate bill with various pieces of House legislation, one of which changes the burden of proof on goods from Xinjiang. None of the House bills touches on tariffs, and none offers funding for chipmakers, a centerpiece of the Senate bill. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. had earlier planned to attach the China package to the must-past National Defense Authorization Act, but after Republican opposition, they decided this was a better way to get the House-Senate talks going.
The Modern Slavery and Human Rights Policy and Evidence Centre says its analysis found there's more risk that businesses used forced labor during the pandemic, both in sectors that experienced demand spikes, such as protective gear like masks, and in the garment sector, where orders were canceled. "The pandemic made it more difficult for businesses to prevent forced labour in their supply chains, but some of the early response [was] likely to have exacerbated vulnerability, for example by cancelling orders," the center said in a report released Nov. 17.
Congress should direct CBP to impose "a region-wide Withhold Release Order on products originating from Xinjiang, China," the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission said within a group of 32 recommendations for lawmakers. Congress should also require the Department of Homeland Security "to provide a comprehensive list of technologies needed and an outline of the resources required to enforce the Withhold Release Order and address other instances of China’s use of forced labor." it said in the report, released Nov. 17.