Agreement in Principle, Pushback in Practice: The Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act

There may never have been a better time to bring sewing back to the United States.

With the advent of the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA), which went into effect on June 21 in the United States, industries that source finished goods or their components from China’s Xinjiang region are clearly impacted. The apparel sector, which relies heavily on cotton grown in Xinjiang, is one of the most heavily affected industries. Xinjiang’s cotton goes into hundreds of apparel brands around the world. Yet now any item coming from Xinjiang will be barred entry into the United States.

The UFLPA presumes the use of forced labor if a product comes from Xinjiang, and puts the burden to prove otherwise on the importer. Clothing brands and apparel companies are now attempting to reorient supply chains so that they comply with the new no-holds-barred law targeting the Chinese Communist Party’s genocidal campaign against Uyghurs and other ethnic minority groups in China’s far northwest.

Apparel is one of four key industries that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has said it will initially focus on in enforcing the law, due to the high risk of suspected forced labor in those sectors. The others are cotton, tomatoes, and polysilicon.

In Xinjiang, up to 2 million people have been subjected to forced internment by the Chinese government in prison-like camps, as has been reported in great detail by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) and others. Recurring leaks of official Chinese government and party documents confirm that the goal is to “re-educate” Uyghurs, stripping them of their ethnic, religious, cultural, and historical identities while enforcing a Sinicized version of identity that supports the Chinese Communist Party and its vision.

Recently, the Chinese government has insisted the camps – which it says are “vocational training” facilities – are closing, having served their purpose. The concern now is that Uyghurs and other minorities are being pushed from detention camps into factory campuses, where they are forced to work and live under heavy surveillance. Refusing these “job offers” may led to another stint in detention.

In the United States, two successive administrations on completely opposite sides of the domestic political spectrum have labelled China’s treatment of the Uyghurs as genocide.

The reaction from business, meanwhile, has had two distinct aspects: agreement in principle, and pushback in practice.

First, not only individual companies, but also major industry trade associations have attempted to get out in front of the Xinjiang forced labor issue since before the bill leading up to the UFLPA was introduced on September 22, 2020.

Industry efforts have focused on finding a solution for all, rather than a solution for the Uyghurs, full stop.

On July 23, 2020, the top five trade associations in the apparel industry issued a joint statement denouncing forced labor. The statement came on the heels of the signing into law of the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act. The statement argued: “A successful solution for all involved, above all the workers themselves, will require state-to-state engagement and collaborative partnerships across government, industry, labor advocacy groups, non-governmental organizations, and other stakeholders.”

It continued: “We again urge our nation’s leaders to immediately establish a multi-stakeholder working group to develop and deploy a collective approach that accurately assesses the problem, identifies constructive solutions to increase transparency, and protects both the rights of workers and the integrity of global supply chains.”

On the surface, the statement reads as if it is in principled agreement with the act. But the last line belies that interpretation.

By placing the “integrity of global supply chains” on a par with “the rights of workers,” the most powerful apparel trade associations in the United States put the importance of business needs on an equal level with the lives of detainees, despite numerous accounts of torture, rape, and wholly illegal imprisonment.

The signatories were the American Apparel & Footwear Association, the Footwear Distributors & Retailers of America, the National Retail Federation, the Retail Industry Leaders Association, and the United States Fashion Industry Association.

Pushback in practice, often brutal, has been the second aspect of the reaction from American business to the UFLPA, especially behind the scenes and before passage of the bill.

As Haley Byrd Wilt wrote in The Dispatch that shortly after the bill was introduced, staff members on the Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC) participated in a call with Coca-Cola’s government representatives.

One of those participants on the call said the conversation was a “bloodbath.”

Coca-Cola’s ire was directed toward the claim that it had ties to a Chinese company that sells sugar, COFCO Tunhe, which in turn had ties to forced labor. Coca-Cola said an audit showed no forced labor was present, yet could not answer simple questions about the methodology of the audit. Nor did they share the audit with the CECC, as they had said they might.

According to the article, Coca-Cola’s lead lobbyist tried to tease out the process through which the legislation would advance. Committees involved in the passage of the bill were later lobbied extensively against passage of the bill that would become the UFLPA.

And this was just the beginning of the corporate pushback against protecting the native peoples of Xinjiang.

Companies opposed having their names in the text of the legislation, fearing negative public perception. They would be in favor of the legislation “in principle,” but in fact, actions spoke to their opposition to a bill to protect genocide victims.

This is not just about one country, or the North Atlantic countries and their partners. Throughout the world, countries have given up the sourcing of their own threads and fibers and cloth to China, which today is using forced labor to produce what people thousands of miles away wear.

Although the fight for decent working conditions and wages has always been a part of the global business environment, in most cases in modern times, workers were not returning to camps where they are kept under lock and key, as they have been in Xinjiang. The case of Xinjiang is also unique as the victims have been forced into labor by dint of their ethnicity and religion in a massive, government-led campaign.

If one looks at the vote in the House and Senate in January of 2022, it would seem to indicate that corporate America is fully on board with this act. It passed the House of Representatives by a vote of 428 to 1. It passed the Senate with 100 percent of the vote.

As the record shows, however, companies who dared not speak out against protecting Uyghurs and other minorities in Xinjiang have nonetheless been actively lobbying Congress as well as other arms of the U.S. government to minimize the impact of the UFLPA on their supply chains and manufacturing arrangements.

The passage of the law has also spurred the creation of a cottage industry: software and compliance programs designed to guide companies through the tedious process of determining which of their products may contain content from Xinjiang, and how to replace those components in their supply chain.

Before the world becomes overwhelmed by the degree to which cutting Xinjiang out of the supply chain will affect clothing and solar panel (using polysilicon) manufacturing going forward, perhaps a short historical perspective needs reiterating. Thirty years ago, Xinjiang was not the source of more than an infinitesimal amount of goods being exported out of China. Countries, industries and companies had not yet become dependent upon it, or for that matter upon China as a whole, either.

Supply chains have grown up in China rapidly. They can be torn down just as quickly, as well.  There is nothing magical about relocation, and when the multinationals go, their subsidiary suppliers will go with them, as well.

Generations grew up with the old axiom that having one well-made piece of clothing, lasting for years and never going out of style, was far better than having several cheaper versions that looked it and never wore well. There is a strong argument for returning to those values, around the world, and paying a little bit more for fewer items, but of greater quality. More importantly, quality-made clothing should necessarily mean that no tortured worker paid the price for one’s outfit that day.