While Lecturing Americans On Racism, Big Business Opposes Ban On Using Foreign Slave Labor
By Helen Raleigh
American companies need to realize — quickly — that promoting and defending American values is both good and necessary for their long-term survival.
Some of the largest American companies — including Apple, Nike, and Coca-Cola — are actively lobbying the U.S. Congress to weaken legislation that would bar the import of products made with Uighur forced labor in Xinjiang province, China.
These corporations are opposing the bipartisan Uighur Forced Labor Prevention Act, which passed the House of Representatives 406-3 in September and is now under consideration in the U.S. Senate. The goal of the bill is to ensure “that goods made with forced labor in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region of the People’s Republic of China do not enter the United States market.”
Since Beijing has so far ignored international condemnation of its treatment of Uighur Muslims, the bill hopes to use economic pain to force Beijing to change its behavior. It also includes a provision to hold publicly traded companies accountable by prosecuting for securities violations the companies found to use forced labor from Xinjiang in their supply chains.
No Excuses for Slave Labor
With the wealth of information available in the internet age, no publicly traded American company’s leaders can pretend ignorance of what’s going on in Xinjiang, China. Since 2017, the Chinese Communist Party’s human rights violations against Uighur Muslims have been widely reported, including its mass incarceration of more than 1 million Uighur Muslim and other minorities (the majority of whom have committed no crimes) and draconian measures against Uighur women that involve subjecting them to frequent pregnancy checks, forcing the use of intrauterine devices and sterilization, and forced abortion on hundreds of thousands.