The United States late Thursday opened trade probes into 60 of its biggest partners to determine whether their policies on goods made with forced labor—or lack thereof—are undercutting U.S. commerce, following a tranche of similar investigations launched a day earlier into excess manufacturing capacity in more than a dozen countries.
Both investigations fall under Section 301 of the 1974 Trade Act, which gives Washington sweeping authority to hit back at unfair foreign practices with new duties. Any resulting tariffs could effectively reinstate the post–“Liberation Day” regime struck down by the Supreme Court last month, giving the Trump administration fresh leverage to extract more concessions in ongoing bilateral talks.
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The forced-labor investigations—covering major garment-producing hubs such as Bangladesh, Cambodia, China, Guatemala, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Turkey, and Vietnam—will zero in on what U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer described as governments’ “failure to impose and effectively enforce measures banning goods produced with forced labor from entering their markets.”
What this means is countries will be scrutinized not for the potential use of forced labor within their borders, but for how effectively they’re keeping out imports made with forced labor.
“For too long, American workers and firms have been forced to compete against foreign producers who may have an artificial cost advantage gained from the scourge of forced labor,” Greer said in a statement. “These investigations will determine whether foreign governments have taken sufficient steps to prohibit the importation of goods produced with forced labor and how the failure to eradicate these abhorrent practices impacts U.S. workers and businesses.”
While the USTR has 12 months to conduct a Section 301 investigation, Greer has committed to wrapping up these inquiries by mid-July—just in time for the existing 10 percent global tariffs, authorized under Section 122 of the 1974 Trade Act, to sunset.
The Coalition for a Prosperous America, a bipartisan organization representing U.S. manufacturers, farmers, and workers, immediately welcomed the news, calling it a “serious and long-overdue effort to address the structural forces that have hollowed out large parts of America’s manufacturing base.”
“For decades, many foreign governments have pursued industrial strategies built on subsidies, suppressed wages, state-owned enterprises and other policies that generate massive excess production and push that surplus into global markets—a surplus that has been largely absorbed by the U.S market with devastating consequences for American producers and workers,” president Jon Toomey said in a statement. “These investigations recognize that those practices directly undermine U.S. manufacturing and investment.”
He added that ensuring global supply chains are free from forced labor is both a “moral and economic imperative.”
But critics have cast doubt on the White House’s strategy. Noting the investigations’ far broader scope, Wendy Cutler, senior vice president at the Asia Society Policy Institute, a Washington think tank, pointed out that many named partners—including several in Southeast Asia—have already agreed to forced-labor provisions in recent U.S. trade deals and “will not be happy to be named in this investigation.”
“And what will be the bar?” she asked on LinkedIn. “Are we expecting countries to mirror our detailed law or something more or less? And if enforcement is also a criterion, will countries that are now working to implement a law be found ‘guilty’ because they first need a law before they can enforce it?”
Trading partners are already crying foul over both rounds of probes. China said Friday it reserves the right to take countermeasures to defend its interests, casting a pall over upcoming U.S.-China talks set to begin in Paris this weekend. Mahmud Hasan Khan, president of the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association, called Bangladesh’s naming “uncomfortable” and “without logical basis.” Thailand’s commerce minister Suphajee Suthumpun said it’s preparing a legal and diplomatic challenge against the inquiry.
The executive arm of the European Union, which adopted rules in 2024 to outlaw goods made with forced labor throughout the 27-member bloc, said it would respond “firmly and proportionately” to any infringement of the deal it reached with the United States last year. “We have not received any indication that the U.S. administration intends to deviate from those commitments,” European Commission spokesperson Olof Gill said in a press conference on Thursday.
Thea Mei Lee, who served as deputy undersecretary for international affairs at the US Department of Labor under President Biden, told Sourcing Journal that using Section 301 in this way felt “odd” and “somewhat tortured.” Still, she noted, securing forced-labor import bans from partners like Canada and Mexico—which are already required under the United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement to prohibit goods made with modern slavery, though enforcement remains limited and uneven—is a “laudable and important goal.”
“It is hard to argue that the failure to adopt such a ban is a major factor hurting U.S. commerce,” she said. “For example, if Algeria imports products made with forced labor and consumes them domestically, does that create a measurable burden on U.S. commerce? If Algeria is transshipping those goods to the U.S. or using them as inputs into goods exported to the U.S., that would be a stronger argument, but there’s no evidence that this is limited to those cases with these 60 countries.”
That said, Canada, Mexico and the EU’s inclusion signals that promising forced-labor import bans aren’t enough, said Joshua Kagan, special counsel at the Washington law firm Kelley Drye & Warren and a former Biden-era assistant U.S. trade representative. Legal mechanisms alone won’t cut it either, he said. What USTR wants is for forced‑labor goods to come to a hard stop at the border.
“Love it or hate it, the U.S. asks on this topic didn’t come out of left field,” Kagan wrote on LinkedIn. “The U.S. has been asking trading partners to implement such measures for years. I’ve sat across from several of these countries and made that ask. Most declined to do so. And for those that did (Canada and Mexico per USMCA commitments, eight countries in recent agreements with the USG, EU), there has been no enforcement of those measures.”
Lee agreed that even willing partners struggle with the personnel, resources and expertise needed to enforce forced-labor import bans. The United States is, to her knowledge, the only country maintaining such a ban for nearly a century via Section 307 of the 1930 Tariff Act—even in its weaker form with the domestic consumption loophole. But aggressive cuts by Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency last year have gutted agencies like the Department of Labor’s Bureau of International Labor Affairs.
“During the Biden administration, ILAB, USTR, and Customs and Border Protection worked with sister agencies in Canada and Mexico to share enforcement strategies and develop cooperative mechanisms, but that was only preliminary,” she said. “With only around half its staff compared to a year ago, ILAB would be pressed to provide the technical assistance and research needed to support these measures.”
It’s a little ironic, noted Peter Harrell, a visiting fellow at Georgetown University’s Institute of International Economic Law, that the Trump administration is invoking trade law to police forced labor abroad while opposing the EU’s corporate due diligence law targeting the same abuses.
“Frankly, both announcements come off as designed to justify a legal basis to re-create the IEEPA tariffs, rather than to do what Congress intended Section 301 to do, which is to help the U.S. government address specific unfair trade practices by specific U.S. trade partners,” he wrote on LinkedIn, using an acronym for the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. “USTR definitely needs to build a stronger factual case if it wants the 301s to attract broad public support and survive the inevitable legal scrutiny. Of course, building the case is one of the things the investigation is for.”
Even so, all of this makes supplier traceability more important than ever, Kagan said.
“Remember that Section 307 prohibits the importation of goods produced wholly or in part with forced labor,” he added. “There is no de minimis threshold. Any amount of forced labor input in an imported product, no matter how minor or how many tiers removed in a supply chain, makes the entire product prohibited from entry. If that model is being magnified across dozens of economies, the need for buyers to know the working conditions occurring upstream in their supply chains becomes even more important.”
