Uyghur Forced Labor, INFORM Act Added to Must-Pass Senate Bill
A bill that would flip the burden of proof on forced labor to say that goods either made in Xinjiang or made by a company that accepts workers transferred from Xinjiang are made with forced labor unless proven otherwise has been attached to the National Defense Authorization Act in the Senate. That means the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act is more likely to pass the Senate before the end of the year.
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Export Compliance Daily combines U.S. export control news, foreign border import regulation and policy developments into a single daily information service that reliably informs its trade professional readers about important current issues affecting their operations.
However, the Senate version does contain some elements that importers like more than the House version. The bill would provide a carve-out to the rebuttable presumption that Xinjiang goods were made with forced labor if the importer "fully complied" with guidance developed by CBP on "due diligence, effective supply chain tracing, and supply chain management measures to ensure that ... importers do not import any goods mined, produced, or manufactured wholly or in part with forced labor from the People's Republic of China." Also, if the company completely and substantively responded to all requests for information from CBP as it tried to determine if the goods were produced by forced labor.
CBP would have to make public twice a year all the times the rebuttable presumption was waived, the bill says. The agency would also be required to tell traders "the type, nature, and extent of evidence that demonstrates" that goods detained or seized due to the ban on the importation of goods made with forced labor were not made with forced labor. The release of a list of companies that accept transferred Xinjiang workers and the release of the guidance that would help importers avoid the rebuttable presumption are due 180 days after passage, which is when the rebuttable presumption takes effect.
Before that, the administration must solicit public comments and hold a public hearing on "how best to ensure that goods mined, produced, or manufactured wholly or in part with forced labor in the People's Republic of China, including by Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Tibetans, and members of other persecuted groups in the People's Republic of China, and especially in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, are not imported into the United States."
The administration is particularly interested in hearing about how to trace the origin of goods, improve supply chain transparency and identify how Chinese goods that were made with forced labor move through other countries before coming to the U.S. It also wants recommendations on how CBP can accurately identify Xinjiang goods.
The bill says that the administration has to develop a plan to continue to identify more companies that accept labor transfers or use Xinjiang inputs, and it has to develop an enforcement plan for all the companies it has identified in those two categories. It says that cotton, tomatoes and polysilicon -- all of which have already been subject to withhold release orders -- are high priorities and they need to have their own specific enforcement plans. Also on forced labor, there's an amendment that tells CBP to assess whether rare earth minerals from Afghanistan are made with forced labor, and therefore should be subject to a WRO.
The NDAA also includes the House version of the The Integrity, Notification, and Fairness in Online Retail Marketplaces for Consumers (INFORM Consumers) Act. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin, D-Ill., and Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., co-sponsored the amendment. The INFORM Act requires high-volume third party sellers on e-commerce platforms to have to disclose their names and a way to contact them. A high-volume seller is defined as someone who has made 200 or more sales in a 12-month period, worth $5,000 or more. It also requires companies like Amazon or e-Bay to create a hotline to allow customers to report postings they believe to be stolen, counterfeit or dangerous products. The Federal Trade Commission would enforce the law, the senators said. There's also an amendment that forbids the operation of railroad freight cars with involvement from state-owned enterprises from non-market rate economies.