The Trump administration has imposed double-digit tariffs on more than 60 countries, citing a legal authority that allows the president to place import taxes and other penalties on nations found to engage in trade practices deemed “unjustifiable,” “unreasonable,” or “discriminatory.”
The newly announced tariffs kicked in just as a set of temporary 10% global tariffs were expiring. Those temporary tariffs had themselves been put in place after the Supreme Court struck down an earlier round of worldwide tariffs back in February. Critics contend the latest round has less to do with fighting forced labor and more to do with keeping tariffs alive through a legal side door.
The tariffs were applied to countries the U.S. determined either lack a ban on goods produced with forced labor or fail to adequately enforce such a ban. The targeted nations — collectively responsible for 99% of U.S. imports — wasted little time pushing back, arguing the administration’s reasoning was baseless and inconsistent, especially since countries with very different human rights records received identical tariff rates of either 10% or 12.5%. The U.S. spent four months investigating but provided little explanation for how it arrived at those specific rates.
The legal basis for the tariffs is Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, which was used here to penalize countries that failed “to impose and effectively enforce a prohibition on the importation of goods produced with forced labor.”
During his first term in office, President Donald Trump also turned to Section 301 to impose broad tariffs on Chinese goods amid a dispute over China’s aggressive efforts to challenge American technological leadership. The same legal authority is currently being used to address what the U.S. describes as unfair Chinese practices in the shipbuilding sector.
“The 301s allow a permanent tariff without going to Congress to settle the dispute,” said Barry Appleton, a law professor and co-director of New York Law School’s Center for International Law. “That’s what all of this is about. The president doesn’t want to knock on the front door of Congress, so he’s trying every side door and every unlatched window to get in.”
The office of the United States Trade Representative said it consulted with all 60 economies under review, held two rounds of public hearings, gathered more than 2,100 public comments, and engaged with trading partners about their efforts to combat forced labor. However, the agency declined to share details about those conversations, saying they were confidential.
Trade experts say it is relatively easy to determine whether a country has a forced-labor import ban on the books, but figuring out the government’s specific reasoning for each country’s enforcement failures is much harder to pin down.
“There’s not a lot of hard evidence there,” said Scott Lincicome, vice president for general economics and trade policy at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. “It’s pretty laughable on its face to think that a country like the ones in Europe or in Norway or Switzerland aren’t doing enough to police forced labor.”
Even if a country were to pass and enforce the kind of forced-labor import ban the U.S. is demanding, it would still need to demonstrate to Washington’s satisfaction that enforcement is actually happening before any tariffs would be lifted, according to lawyer Patrick Childress, a partner at Holland & Knight and a former U.S. trade official.
“This suggests that no short-term path for countrywide relief from the new Section 301 tariffs will be available,” he said.
Several countries have challenged the administration’s findings. Brazil, which faces a 12.5% tariff, called the move “arbitrary and unjustified,” saying the U.S. “chose to manipulate an issue of great importance to human rights and the struggles of workers worldwide in order to accuse 59 countries and the European Union of unfair practices.”
Australia also disputed the rationale for its 12.5% tariff. “We believe that amongst all of the countries in the world, Australia does take the issue of slavery, modern slavery, seriously, and will continue to do that,” Trade Minister Don Farrell told reporters in Adelaide.
Certain industry exemptions have stirred controversy as well. The National Council of Textile Organizations, which calls itself the voice of the American textile industry, objected to a provision that shields textile and apparel imports from Bangladesh, Cambodia, Indonesia, and Malaysia from the Section 301 tariffs, based on those countries purchasing U.S. cotton and textiles.
“No other industry has been more disadvantaged by forced labor than the U.S. textile industry, which employs 453,000 workers and has lost 41 plants over the past two plus years,” said NCTO chief executive Kim Glas. “We remain strongly concerned that USTR’s textile mechanism will harm the very domestic manufacturers the administration seeks to help.”
The U.S. has two major laws related to forced-labor import restrictions. The Tariff Act of 1930 gave Customs and Border Protection the power to seize shipments suspected of involving forced labor and to block further imports — but it contained a significant loophole: if domestic supply couldn’t meet demand, imports were allowed regardless of how they were made. The Trade Facilitation and Trade Enforcement Act, which took effect in 2016, closed that loophole.
In 2021, the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act was enacted, blocking imports from China’s Xinjiang region unless companies can prove the goods were not produced with forced labor.
Despite these laws, goods made with forced labor continue to enter the U.S. market. A 2015 Associated Press investigation revealed that slave labor was being used in Southeast Asia’s fishing industry, with the resulting seafood reaching supermarkets and pet food companies across the country. A 2020 AP investigation into the $65 billion palm oil industry uncovered labor abuses involving millions of workers — men, women, and children — across Asia, with that palm oil making its way into supply chains for major companies including Unilever, L’Oreal, Nestle, and Procter & Gamble.
At hearings on the tariffs held this month, National Retail Federation vice president Jonathan Gold — appearing on behalf of the business coalition the Joint Association Forced Labor Working Group — argued that for import bans to be effective, they would need to be far more robust. He called for “clear, measurable benchmarks” tied to tariffs and urged the U.S. to help countries build out their enforcement programs.
Kenya Davis, a partner at the Boies Schiller Flexner law firm, said an effective ban requires a “comprehensive approach” that makes investigations transparent and includes programs to help countries enforce the bans.
