On January 14, 2025, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced the addition of 37 companies based in China to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) Entity List, bringing the total number of entities on the UFLPA Entity List to nearly 150 entities.
According to a press release by DHS, the entities added include globally recognized companies that mine and process Xinjiang’s critical minerals, that grow Xinjiang cotton and manufacture textiles for global export, and that manufacture inputs for solar modules with polysilicon made in Xinjiang.
Effective January 15, 2025, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) will apply a rebuttable presumption that goods produced by the named 37 entities will be prohibited from entering the United States as a result of the companies’ activities, either sourcing materials from the XUAR or working with the government of Xinjiang to recruit, transport, transfer, harbor, or receive Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, or members of other persecuted groups out of the XUAR.
For general background information on the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA), see Thompson Hine’s International Trade Update of June 2022.
Separately, the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) published its first-ever “Trade Strategy to Combat Forced Labor.” The strategy sets forth a comprehensive approach to using trade tools to combat forced labor. The document outlines a number of goals and priority actions that USTR indicates it has achieved during the President Joseph Biden’s administration, as well as areas for potential future action. The strategy involves four goals: (i) developing an equitable trade policy through inclusive processes; (ii) fully utilizing all available trade tools to combat forced labor; (iii) developing and implementing innovative trade tools to combat forced labor; and (iv) increasing multilateral engagement with trading partners to combat forced labor. Each goal lists priority actions and the strategy document concludes with the following:
[This strategy] is a key piece of USTR’s broader worker-centered trade policy. Our past trade policy was based on the notion that as trade liberalized, everyone would prosper and that improvements for working people would follow. However, without creating guard rails to ensure that trade was in fact benefiting everyday people, the trading system created a race to the bottom that rewarded worker exploitation, including forced labor. USTR is keen to learn from lessons of the past, and we continue to press forward on a trade policy for the future – one that benefits workers, not just as consumers in the global economy, but as individuals whose labor makes the global trading system possible, and addresses the use of forced labor as unfair competition for businesses.
Noting that the United States cannot “do this alone” the USTR asks all of trading partners “to heed this clarion call to combat forced labor.” A copy of the Forced Labor Trade Strategy is available here.