“BIG NEWS on the FORCED LABOR IMPORT BAN FRONT!” wrote Laura Murphy, professor of human rights and contemporary slavery at Sheffield Hallam University’s Helena Kennedy Centre for International Justice, in a LinkedIn post over the weekend.
Murphy, who previously advised the Department of Homeland Security on forced labor issues, was referring to the trade agreements that the United States inked with Cambodia and Malaysia, and, to a lesser extent, the frameworks of deals with Thailand and Vietnam. Buried within them, she noted, were easily missable provisions that could have far-reaching consequences for labor rights around the world.
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Malaysia’s pact, for instance, refers to commitments “on preventing forced labor and effectively identifying and addressing labor law violations in sectors with a high-risk of forced labor and child labor.” In Cambodia’s case, the nation must “adopt and effectively implement a prohibition on the importation of goods mined, produced or manufactured wholly or in part by forced or compulsory labor as defined by the relevant International Labor Organization instruments to which Cambodia is a party.” Even Vietnam and Thailand’s sketchier agreements include language on beefing up the enforcement of their labor laws alongside more typical promises involving improving market access for U.S. exports into those countries and preferential treatment for American companies.
The agreements have come under fire for being, at best, the “least-worst” option, as the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, which promotes international cooperation, put it. In return for a raft of concessions, the United States has pledged only to maintain the 19 percent “reciprocal” tariff on Cambodia, Malaysia and Thailand and 20 percent on Vietnam, though certain goods could be exempted.
Still, it was only last week that Kelly Fay Rodriguez, who served as special representative for international labor affairs at the Department of State under former President Joe Biden, wrote an op-ed for Foreign Policy criticizing President Donald Trump for pursuing the “most aggressive anti-worker policies of any administration in more than a generation,” both foreign and domestic, that have “undermined labor rights, gutted institutions that enforce labor standards and targeted labor unions—to the detriment of working people everywhere.”
This included eviscerating technical assistance programs funded by the Department of State, Department of Labor and the U.S. Agency for International Development that promoted workers’ rights by fighting forced labor and other workplace abuses. Even statistics supplied by Customs and Border Protection have shown a palpable decline in its policing of the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, or UFLPA, raising questions about the agency’s current ability to prioritize enforcement of what is essentially a ban on all goods with ties to China’s persecution of ethnic Muslim minorities in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.
“Since the Trump administration took office again in January, we have not yet seen a commitment to wielding the UFLPA effectively,” Murphy and fellow researcher Charlotte Tate wrote in a recent analysis for the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a nonprofit think tank. “No new entities have been added to the list, and CBP’s detentions have fallen. Without effective enforcement of the law, importers may determine that compliance is costlier than buying artificially cheap goods made in the XUAR.”
What appears to be a shift toward requiring American partners to adopt stronger import bans on goods made with forced labor, however, could signal the Trump administration’s desire to prevent the transshipment of tainted products into the United States through third countries, a common enforcement loophole, said Lucas A. Rock, an associate involved with import compliance matters at the law firm ArentFox Schiff. Despite not explicitly mentioning Xinjiang, this approach, by citing Section 307 of the 1930 Tariff Act, “places more responsibility on foreign manufacturers and partner governments to combat forced labor,” he said.
That “high-risk sectors” were referred to without name-dropping the UFLPA wasn’t wholly unexpected, given the “politically charged dynamics related to it,” said Adrian Zenz, a senior fellow in China studies at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, an educational, research and human rights nonprofit. Nevertheless, Xinjiang, as an obvious hotspot, hardly needs spelling out.
“The focus on forced labor best practices, Section 307 and banning transshipments all point in the same direction: curbing China’s unfair advantage from state-imposed forced labor and using third countries to conceal the links to Xinjiang,” Zenz said. The effort as such can be interpreted in light of the updated U.S. Department of State page on U.S.-China relations under Trump, which specifically focuses on how China’s forced labor harms U.S. interests.”
The implications could be “major,” he said, because 86 percent of goods detained under the UFLPA until late 2024 entered the United States via Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam. At the same time, some of the language is couched in caveats, stating, for instance, that Malaysia and Cambodia “may” enforce entities under section 307. With some countries having a “track record of placating Beijing,” ensuring meaningful enforcement of the labor provisions will require “significant effort and ongoing political pressure,” Zenz added.
The fact is that import bans are only as effective as the number of countries that adopt them, said Sheela Ahluwalia, director of policy and advocacy at Transparentem, a New York-based nonprofit that investigates environmental and human rights abuses in global supply chains. The goal, she said, is that “no country should be a safe harbor for goods made with forced labor.”
There are broader implications, too. Coupled with recommendations by the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative this month to impose tariffs of up to 100 percent on some or all goods from Nicaragua because its “unreasonable” labor and human rights policies under Section 301 of the 1974 Trade Act, and what she characterized as the European Parliament’s “rejection” of an “omnibus” package that could water down corporate due diligence requirements, investors, buyers and suppliers should consider the deals a sign that the costs and risks around forced labor and other supply chain malfeasance will continue to grow.
“There are more questions than answers about how this will play out, and implementation and enforcement are key,” Ahluwalia said. “But it’s clear that companies that have taken their foot off the gas pedal in meaningful human rights due diligence need to keep it pressed down.”
Rodriguez, the former Biden official—and current visiting fellow at Cornell ILR School’s Global Labor Institute—agrees. As important as the labor provisions are, they also require substantial U.S. government technical capacity and foreign assistance to “make them real.”
“It takes an enormous amount of work from inside the government and outside to make these policies work effectively,” she said. “It took us years of work for the US to partner with Mexico and Canada under the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement for them to begin to develop their own domestic bans on forced labor-made products. It required both executive branch execution and congressional engagement and oversight.”
In this current landscape, however, it’s “incredibly difficult” for Rodriguez to “even imagine” implementation of these provisions, given the “massive gutting” of government employees working on global labor issues and the elimination of nearly $600 million in foreign assistance to frontline labor organizations that might have picked up the slack.
“There has been growing bipartisan consensus over the last decade that U.S. trade policy must include strong labor standards and effective enforcement mechanisms, which we saw in the USMCA and UFLPA laws and implementation previously,” she added. “Right now, it’s like the U.S. is trying to move these policies with our hands tied behind our backs because we don’t have the capacity to partner effectively and make these policies real.”
For Tharo Khun, program manager at the Center of Alliance of Labor and Human Rights, the Cambodian workers’ rights group better known as CENTRAL, the lack of details, delivered in consultation with civil society organizations and independent trade unions, makes the agreements mushier than he’d like.
Then again, it’s only Thailand’s framework that lays out a requirement to amend the country’s law to safeguard workers’ rights to freedom of association and collective bargaining—two issues that Cambodia’s workers have been struggling with.
“There is no concrete action plan or roadmap to ensure that the Cambodian government upholds the labor rights despite systematic labor rights violations in Cambodia,” he said. “If the goal is to improve labor rights meaningfully, then the concrete benchmarks and timelines should be part of any agreement and independent monitoring mechanisms need to be established.”
Meanwhile, Khun said, trade incentives or penalties should be tied to actual progress. The empowerment of independent labor movements, too, must take priority. Malaysia, for example, has grappled with cases of forced labor in its garment sector, including some involving migrant workers from Bangladesh, Indonesia and Myanmar. Women producing clothing and shoes face in Vietnam face high rates of sexual harassment and violence on the factory floor. And worker leaders in Cambodia and Thailand have been hit with criminal charges for trying to organize.
Writing on LinkedIn, Murphy, who was recently pipped to the post of fellow at the Harvard Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights, said she knows of people in the U.S. government who have worked hard to ensure that labor provisions remain part of trade agreements.
“I’m sure they’ll be monitoring,” she said. “But I think there’s going to also need to be resources for stakeholders on the ground in these countries to enable their governments, for companies to understand how to comply, for knowledge sharing opportunities between governments.” Murphy dropped a bunch of ellipses before concluding, “It’s a lot of work.”
