The Trump administration's latest round of tariffs, hitting 60 trading partners with duties as high as 12.5%, arrived Friday morning with a new justification: forced labor. The rationale sounds righteous until you examine who's actually doing the forcing.
The US alleges that countries importing goods made with coerced workers unfairly undercut American producers. The problem is that America itself is among the world's worst offenders on this front, and unlike its trading partners, the US government runs the operation directly.
Start with the facts on imports. Americans buy roughly $170 billion worth of goods tainted by forced labor somewhere in the supply chain, according to the Global Slavery Index. That's the highest among G20 nations. The electronics come from China and Malaysia. Clothing flows from India, Vietnam and Bangladesh. Fish arrive from Ghana. Timber comes from Russia, Brazil and Peru. Even the minerals essential to American tech, from cobalt to lithium, are mined under conditions rife with human rights abuses.
Yet the US has enforcement problems of its own. While America was the only country to explicitly ban importing goods made with forced or convict labor, the Global Slavery Index found no evidence that penalties actually get levied against companies that break these rules.
The hypocrisy deepens when looking inward. An estimated 1.1 million people lived in modern slavery inside the US on any given day in 2021, according to the same index. That works out to 3.3 forced workers per thousand people. The Netherlands has 0.6. Germany has 0.6. Britain has 1.8.
Countries Trump is now punishing for failing to stamp out forced labor have lower slavery rates than America does. Canada, which just got hit with a 10% tariff, has only 1.8 forced workers per thousand people.
But here's where the story shifts from hypocrisy to something darker. A massive chunk of America's forced labor problem is state-sponsored.
The US is nearly alone among democracies in allowing prisoners to be forced to work, and there is nothing in law preventing goods made by these workers from being exported. The 13th Amendment abolished slavery except as punishment for crime. About 800,000 of the nation's 1.2 million incarcerated people work, often involuntarily and under threat of punishment, according to a 2022 report by the American Civil Liberties Union and the University of Chicago.
In seven southern states, Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina and Texas, prisons pay nothing at all for this labor. Other states pay pennies per hour. Prisoners work in poultry plants, fast-food restaurant kitchens, on penal farm plantations, and in construction. Their wages are routinely garnished by the state.
The operation is profitable. Incarcerated workers produce goods and services worth more than $11 billion annually, according to ACLU calculations. In Alabama alone, between 2018 and mid-2024, private businesses leased at least 500 incarcerated workers, evidence of how widespread the practice has become.
These aren't factories hidden in remote countries where enforcement is difficult. They're American institutions, run by American governments, using American citizens as a labor force stripped of even minimal protections against exploitation and abuse.
If Trump genuinely cared about forced labor, he wouldn't need to look overseas. He'd look at his own southern states, many of which depend on unpaid prison labor to balance their budgets and operate their facilities. That would be a harder fight than slapping tariffs on Vietnam.
Author James Rodriguez: "The administration's tariff strategy is built on sand when America itself operates a forced labor system the developing world hasn't matched."
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