WASHINGTON — A bill being sent to US President Barack Obama this week includes a provision that would ban US imports of fish caught by slaves in Southeast Asia, gold mined by children in Africa and garments sewn by abused women in Bangladesh.
The new law is aimed at closing a loophole in an 85-year-old tariff law that has failed to keep products of forced and child labour out of the United States.
An investigation by The Associated Press last year found Thai companies were shipping seafood to the US that was caught and processed by trapped and enslaved workers. AP tracked fish and shrimp from people locked in cages and factories to supply chains of top retailers and restaurants, from supermarket chains like Wal-Mart and Whole Foods to restaurants including Red Lobster.
The companies all said they strongly condemned labour abuse and were taking steps to prevent it. The Thai government and leading players in its fishery industry have also taken a number of steps to crack down on abuses.
As a result of the AP reports, more than 2,000 trapped fishermen have been freed, more than a dozen alleged traffickers arrested and millions of dollars worth of seafood and vessels seized.
Thai Union Group, one of the world's biggest seafood exporters, says it has hired 1,200 workers from outsourced shrimp processing sheds into safer, more closely regulated in-house jobs with decent pay.
On Capitol Hill, the AP investigation, along with other media reports and political advocacy, helped pressure lawmakers "to finally strike this obscene provision of US law", said Sen Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat.
"It's an outrage this loophole persisted for so long. No product made by people held against their will, or by children, should ever be imported to the United States,'' he said.
The change is part of a wide-ranging bill that revamps trade laws and bars internet taxes. It passed on a vote of 75-20 by the Senate on Thursday. President Obama is expected to sign it.
The US Tariff Act of 1930 gave Customs and Border Protection the authority to seize shipments where forced labour is suspected and block further imports. However, it has been used only 39 times in 85 years in large part because of an exemption that said goods made by children, prisoners or slaves can be allowed into the US if consumer demand cannot be met without them.
Lawmakers who drafted it during the Depression at the time placed economic need over foreign labour rights, according to legal historians.
If signed by President Obama, imports on a Labor Department list of more than 350 goods produced by child or forced labour — cotton from Kazakhstan, wheat from Pakistan, lobsters from Honduras — may now face federal law enforcement.
David Olave, a Washington-based trade consultant, said he's concerned about unfair and overreaching seizures by Customs and Border Protection investigators who would be hard-pressed to prove a product in a particular shipping container was picked or processed by a forced labourer.
And he said US firms have already been proactive in trying to keep labour abuse out of their supply chains, well ahead of government regulations.
"From my perspective, this is more of an image issue,'' he said, "It looks bad, to have a law that says we want to stop child labour, unless we really need it. It might have sounded okay in 1930 but it doesn't sound good today.''