Good!
U.S. cracks down on imported goods made by Uyghurs and other victims of forced labor
With the closing of an old loophole, the U.S. is blocking the import of millions of dollars worth of clothing and other goods made with "slave" labor.
By Adiel Kaplan
Last month, dozens of boxes of sneakers, men's dress shirts, blouses and other clothing were unloaded off a plane in Atlanta, bound for U.S. consumers. But the shipments never made it out of the port.
Although many of the goods listed Vietnam as their country of origin, Customs and Border Protection inspectors detained the goods because of
]"reasonable suspicion" that they were actually made with cotton harvested by forced labor in China's Xinjiang region, where more than 1 million Uyghurs are believed to be held in camps.
Just a year ago, the goods might have sailed through customs. Now, however, customs officials are detaining hundreds of millions of dollars of goods suspected of being made with forced labor, many of them products Americans consume and use every day, from clothes to palm oil, tomatoes, rubber gloves and even hair extensions.
Already, it is clear that Chinese cotton has become the main target of the new enforcement push. Seventy-five percent of the nearly 1,000 import shipments intercepted so far this fiscal year were suspected of containing cotton from Xinjiang, which produces 20 percent of the world's supply.
The U.S. has had the legal authority to detain goods it suspects were produced through forced labor since 1930, but for 85 years it was almost impossible for officials to apply that power because of a trade law loophole. Officials issued orders barring goods only twice in the 1950s and 30 times in the '90s — many against Chinese imports made with prison labor.
The government had not issued a forced labor order in 15 years when the loophole, which exempted any goods for which domestic production did not meet demand, was closed in 2016. The U.S. began cracking down slowly, with just four orders that year and two more in 2018. This year, enforcement actions have skyrocketed. This fiscal year, which ends this month, Customs and Border Protection, or CBP, has detained at least 967 shipments worth more than $367 million, according to the agency. Detention of goods does not mean the companies affected were necessarily aware of forced labor in the supply chain.
"That change is extremely significant," said Scott Nova, executive director of the Worker Rights Consortium, a nonprofit organization that investigates working conditions in factories around the world. "Brands have effectively never had to think about legal liability in the context of the labor practices of their overseas suppliers. [This] forces them to do so."
more:
http://www.nbcnews.com/business/economy/u-s-cracks-down-imported-goods-made-uyghurs-other-victims-n1278157?cid=eml_nbn_20210906&user_email=d60e03639eee858a9d1f722503050fb5c4c275d9e0d473a7e1f6182e26eccb3c&%243p=e_sailthru&_branch_match_id=963351766522739862&utm_medium=Email%20Sailthru
Do something positive.
| 
