While out holiday shopping in Washington, D.C., recently, we picked up a small toy for our nephew: a miniature Washington, D.C., city bus, officially licensed by the city government. It was charming, well-made, and the perfect gift. Yet, when we turned the box over, we saw the toy was manufactured in Guangdong Province in China, a high-risk area for forced labor. We put it back down.
Despite having both worked on international forced labor issues, we were surprised to see that our own holiday shopping in a liberal Washington, D.C., store implicated us in human rights abuses. The uncomfortable truth is that forced labor is so deeply embedded in global supply chains that many of us are encountering it with alarming frequency.
In the case of this miniature city bus, a toy company selling goods in the United States worked with a supplier that contracted with a manufacturer in China, and our region’s transportation authority, WMATA, licensed the end product. Eventually, it made its way to consumers in Washington, D.C.
Across China, most severely in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, the government operates one of the largest and most coercive forced labor systems in the world. Uyghurs and other Turkic and Muslim groups are subjected to arbitrary incarceration, family separation, forced sterilization, and forced labor. The atrocities committed by the Chinese government against the Uyghur people bear the hallmarks of genocide. Under these conditions, refusing a labor “assignment” is not an option.
While most may assume these abuses are distant, confined within the borders of an authoritarian state, our domestic marketplaces tell another story. The suffering of the Uyghur people is ending up in our homes, in our workplaces, and under our Christmas trees — the end result of a state-imposed system of exploitation. Because of China’s labor transfer schemes, other provinces, such as Guangdong, are also at high risk of forced labor. These areas openly provide goods to global brands for consumers in the West, likely including that small city bus at our local store.
Multinational companies have struggled to avoid being complicit in these horrors, and this exploited labor, at a massive scale, is ending up in Western supply chains. When we worked in government, we reviewed evidence for U.S. trade enforcement actions and contributed to federal reporting on forced labor, and it became unmistakably clear how easily state-imposed coercion seeps into global supply chains far beyond Xinjiang.
Earlier this year, Global Rights Compliance released a major report showing that many critical minerals and the goods made from them are reaching Western consumers through the supply chains of global brands. GRC linked Uyghur forced labor to a vast range of products, including coffee mugs, electric vehicles, power tools, household paint, and aircraft components.
Holiday shoppers should not have to be supply chain experts. No parent choosing a toy should have to wonder whether it was made by someone who was forced to work.
Companies should ensure that goods produced with forced labor simply never reach our shelves. Corporate due diligence mechanisms need to be strengthened to detect forced labor, particularly when sourcing from areas where the exploitation is imposed by the state. Consumers can and should make these demands of the companies that they buy from.
SHEIN AND TEMU MUST BE RESTRICTED OVER SLAVE LABOR
State-imposed forced labor systems originating in the Uyghur Region have spread as forced labor transfers increasingly move Uyghur workers to factories across China to other high-risk areas such as Guangdong. With these systems becoming normalized and institutionalized, it is harder to avoid purchasing products tainted with forced labor.
This holiday season, consumers shouldn’t be left to navigate these risks alone. Governments must enforce existing laws with far greater rigor, and companies must confront the true costs of opaque supply chains by cutting ties with any source touched by state-imposed forced labor. Encouragingly, there are many examples of companies that have done so. No child’s joy should come at the cost of another person’s freedom.
Samir Goswami is the director of forced labor programs at Global Rights Compliance. Annick Febrey is the principal and cofounder of Better Trade Collective. Previously, they both worked in the U.S. government on forced labor issues.
