Uyghur Forced Labor Bill Could Pass in April, Lobbyist Says
The Senate and House versions of the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act have diverged fairly substantially and the law seems likely to ultimately be closer to the Senate approach, said Ray Bucheger, a lobbyist at FBB Federal Relations. The House bill is more punitive, including a requirement for CBP to name and shame importers whose goods are detained. The Senate bill requires public comment and a public hearing open to importers before establishing a strategy to prevent the importation of goods made with forced labor. Part of that process is expected to produce guidance to importers, and there will still be a rebuttable presumption that goods from China's Xinjiang region were made with forced labor, but if importers implemented the guidance, that would change the burden of proof, according to Bucheger.
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Bucheger, who was speaking March 18 to a Coalition of New England Companies for Trade audience, said that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., is looking to assemble a package of China legislation to move as soon as April, and that a forced labor bill could be one plank of it. “The political attention to this issue of forced labor is only going to grow,” Bucheger said. He said that while the House version of the bill was largely unchanged when it was reintroduced, the Senate version's updates “better reflect reality, which is companies are actively working to decouple their supply chains from Xinjiang.”
The moderator described the Senate bill as one that would give importers more time to get their houses in order, and Bucheger said that's also appropriate, given that new tools that would allow tracking of inputs in the supply chain are being developed.
Therese Randazzo, director of the forced labor division in the trade remedy and law enforcement directorate at CBP, said that while the agency is exploring whether there are technologies that could pinpoint the presence of cotton grown in Xinjiang, for instance, there isn't yet a technology that companies could use to learn where all the cotton in their garments came from. “We wish there was a silver bullet as much as you do,” she said on the CONECT call. “It is resource-intensive on both sides.”
Randazzo referred to how small her team is, and said that while CBP will be updating statistics on the number of detentions quarterly, it is too thinly staffed to attribute the detentions to specific withhold release orders. She also said “the detentions themselves don’t tell the whole story” because they “don’t capture the other impacts of the WROs, for example, where companies don’t ship those goods to the United States anymore.”
Bucheger said members of Congress want to know how many detentions are attributable to specific WROs, and also want information about what specific evidence is being used to make the determination that a WRO is warranted. Randazzo has said that releasing more information about evidence could compromise ongoing investigations (see 2103120051). Bucheger said that because of the intensity of interest among members, he's heard that Senate Finance Committee staff and House Ways and Means Committee staff spend more time on forced labor than any other issue.
Bucheger said that Congress appropriated an additional $8 million for forced labor enforcement at CBP in this fiscal year, and he thinks members will “push for an even bigger increase this year.” He added, “To be clear, we don’t expect congressional action to be limited to Uyghur forced labor.”
Brian Bensman, senior director compliance in global logistics for Cintas Corporation, a uniform manufacturer, said Cintas has no nexus to Xinjiang, but now that customers are asking about forced labor, the company is going beyond its past practice of doing annual third-party compliance audits of Tier 1 suppliers. Bensman said it's important that companies are able to talk with CBP and other agencies about what is feasible in terms of due diligence across multiple tiers.
He said companies want to have input into what the standards will be for proving something's not made with forced labor. Bucheger agreed. Importers support congressional action, he said, but they want to make sure that whatever is passed is implementable and enforceable.