In a joint statement, Canada's trade minister, Mexico's economy minister and U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai said they reviewed USMCA committee work, noting progress and offering “recommendations for future work to maintain progress.”
A former U.S. trade representative and a former deputy national security adviser agree that companies that do business in China are stuck between a rock and a hard place, as they will anger China if they disavow abuses in Xinjiang or Hong Kong, but could break U.S. law if they make clothes with Xinjiang cotton.
The day before the first USMCA Free Trade Commission meeting, U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai and Canada's trade minister, Mary Ng, talked about how to strengthen North American supply chains, combat forced labor and climate change, and reform the World Trade Organization.
Mexico and Canada emphasized how the COVID-19 pandemic has proven the need for interlinked supply chains, but U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai emphasized supply chains' downside as she, Mexico's economy minister and Canada's trade minister sat down to the first Free Trade Commission meeting of the USMCA. Tai said, "Not only have we discovered the fragility of our supply chains, but we have just begun to appreciate the degree to which they run counter to our collective goals of ensuring that workers within North America, and outside it, are paid a fair wage, in a safe workplace."
U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai, in her second day of testimony on Capitol Hill, heard again and again from members of Congress who are hearing from companies in their districts that they want Section 301 tariff exclusions back. She heard repeatedly that the 9% countervailing duties on Canadian lumber are making a bad situation worse. And she heard that the Miscellaneous Tariff Bill and Generalized System of Preferences benefits program should be renewed. On each topic, both Democrats and Republicans shared concerns, though on GSP, Republicans only spoke of the cost to importers, while Democrats worried about the effects of GSP on the eligible countries. Tai testified for more than four hours in front of the House Ways and Means Committee on May 13.
Thea Lee, a former AFL-CIO trade economist and top official for 20 years, will be leading the Department of Labor's Bureau of International Labor Affairs, which is involved in both enforcement of the USMCA labor chapter and in investigating forced labor and the worst forms of child labor. The AFL-CIO reacted to the news of her appointment by saying “there is no better person to help strengthen enforcement of labor standards that increase the power of workers in the U.S. and around the world. She will also help shape policies to end forced labor and egregious worker rights violations throughout global supply chains.” The job is not one that requires Senate confirmation.
Uyghur Human Rights Project Board Chair Nury Turkel told the House Foreign Affairs Committee that his nonprofit wants swift passage of the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, which would create a rebuttable presumption that goods from China's Xinjiang province were made with forced labor. "The 11 current Withhold-release orders (WROs) are a wholly inadequate response to the gravity of the crimes, the harm to American workers whose wages are undercut by forced-labor competition, and the unwitting complicity of American consumers who buy face masks, hair weaves, cotton apparel, and solar panels produced by the forced labor of Muslim Uyghurs," he said in his prepared testimony.
Former U.S. ambassador to the World Trade Organization Dennis Shea says a planned discussion at the WTO about matters that affect trade in cotton “must examine the trade impact of the use of forced labor to pick cotton in China’s Xinjiang province.” Shea, who was writing for the Center for Strategic and International Studies, where he is now an adjunct fellow, said “ignoring what is happening in Xinjiang would be tantamount to the WTO holding a meeting on global public health and trade without mentioning the Covid-19 pandemic. ... The use of forced labor in the province has likely depressed the global price of cotton, adversely impacted other cotton-exporting nations (particularly those in the developing world) and improperly distorted global trade flows,” and may even be a countervailable subsidy. Shea said the U.S. should raise the issue during the late May meeting.
U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai's conversations with her counterparts from Italy and the Netherlands addressed global overcapacity in steel, according to summaries of the video calls released April 16. The administration has suggested that Section 232 tariffs on aluminum and steel cannot be removed until overcapacity has been addressed, even when the countries subject to those tariffs are not dumping steel or aluminum in their exports to the U.S.
At a time when hurricane damage, violence and poverty are driving more Central Americans to the U.S., consultants, advocates and former diplomats say the Central America Free Trade Agreement, or CAFTA, needs changes to spur development in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. Those Northern Triangle countries are the ones sending large numbers of asylum seekers to the U.S. in the last few years. Kellie Meiman Hock, a McLarty Associates managing partner who led the April 14 panel hosted by the Washington International Trade Association, noted that when CAFTA was ratified more than 15 years ago, the hope was that it would bring more economic development to Central America. But instead, trade from the region has been flat.