Fight against forced labour or a fight to skip Congress? Dissecting Trump's new tariffs

The Trump administration has imposed tariffs of 10 to 12.5 per cent on more than 60 countries, invoking a legal provision that lets the president levy duties against nations found to engage in unjustifiable, unreasonable or discriminatory trade practices.

The tariffs, announced in recent days, take effect just as temporary 10 per cent worldwide tariffs expired. Those tariffs had themselves replaced an earlier round of worldwide tariffs that the Supreme Court struck down in February.

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The new duties target countries that Washington says do not have, or do not effectively enforce, a ban on importing goods made with forced labour. The affected nations account for 99 per cent of US imports. Several of them have pushed back, arguing that countries with very different track records on forced labour have been handed identical tariff rates. The US Trade Representative's office spent four months investigating but has released few details on how the rates were determined.

A route around Congress

The tariffs were imposed under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, applied to countries the US determined had failed to impose and enforce a prohibition on forced-labour imports. Trump had used the same provision during his first term to impose broad tariffs on Chinese goods amid a dispute over Beijing's trade practices, and it is also being used against China's shipbuilding sector.

Law professor Barry Appleton of New York Law School said Section 301 tariffs do not require congressional approval to settle a dispute, which he suggested was the underlying appeal of the mechanism for the administration.

Enforcement evidence in question

The USTR said it consulted all 60 economies under investigation, held two rounds of public hearings and received more than 2,100 public comments, though it has kept details of those talks confidential.

Trade experts note that while it is relatively simple to check whether a country has a forced-labour import ban on the books, establishing why a government may be falling short on enforcement is far harder to document. Scott Lincicome of the Cato Institute questioned the evidentiary basis for including European nations such as Norway and Switzerland in the list.

Lawyer Patrick Childress, a former US trade official now with Holland & Knight, said countries would still need to demonstrate enforcement to Washington's satisfaction before tariffs are lifted, meaning no quick relief is likely to be available.

Pushback from governments and industry

Brazil, facing a 12.5 per cent tariff, called the move arbitrary and said the US had used a serious human rights issue to level accusations against 59 countries and the European Union. Australia's Trade Minister Don Farrell also disputed the basis for his country's 12.5 per cent tariff, saying Australia takes modern slavery seriously.

Domestically, the National Council of Textile Organisations criticised a carve-out exempting textile and apparel imports from Bangladesh, Cambodia, Indonesia and Malaysia, tied to those countries' purchases of US cotton and textiles. NCTO chief executive Kim Glas said the mechanism could hurt US manufacturers even as it claims to protect them.

Existing US laws have gaps

The US already has two major forced-labour import laws: the Tariff Act of 1930, later strengthened by the 2016 Trade Facilitation and Trade Enforcement Act, and the 2021 Uyghur Forced Labour Prevention Act, which blocks imports from China's Xinjiang region unless companies can prove goods were not made with forced labour.

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Despite these measures, forced-labour-linked goods have entered US supply chains before. Associated Press investigations found slave labour in Southeast Asia's fishing industry in 2015 and in the global palm oil industry in 2020, with the latter linking abuses to supply chains of companies including Unilever, L'Oreal, Nestle and Procter & Gamble.

Calls for a broader framework

At recent hearings, National Retail Federation vice president Jonathan Gold, representing the Joint Association Forced Labour Working Group, said effective import bans would require clear, measurable benchmarks for countries and US support to help build enforcement capacity. Kenya Davis of Boies Schiller Flexner said a comprehensive approach would also need greater transparency about how investigations are conducted, alongside enforcement assistance for affected countries.

With inputs from AP