Apple, Nike and Coca-Cola Lobby Against Xinjiang Forced Labor Bill

December 1, 2020 5:19 AM

Business groups and major companies like Apple have been pressing Congress to alter legislation cracking down on imports of goods made with forced labor from persecuted Muslim minorities in China. (previously: 1, 2, 3)
posted by - (21 comments total)

Greg Rossiter, the director of global communications at Nike, said the company “did not lobby against” the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act but instead had “constructive discussions” with congressional staff aides aimed at eliminating forced labor and protecting human rights.

I'm not in an argument, just a "constructive discussion".
posted by tofu_crouton at 5:45 AM on December 1, 2020 [13 favorites]

According to the article the issue for the companies is that they have contracts with suppliers that prohibit the use of forced labor and they have third party monitoring / audits via recognized international organizations to ensure suppliers follow their contracts. The companies are arguing for changes to the law to accommodate and acknowledge these practices.

Now there are probably deeper layers to this; and that counterpoint from the companies probably is not quite that simple either. In the spirit of moving beyond outrage Internet political discourse maybe we can talk about these complexities and explore them a bit.
posted by interogative mood at 7:03 AM on December 1, 2020 [4 favorites]

Those auditing capabilities don't seem to amount to very much. Supposedly they've been in place for years but they didn't prevent Uyghur slave labor from being used thus far, and there's not much reason to believe they'll do any better in the future. The state machinery is applied to denying that Uyghur people are being held without charge and exploited as slave labor at all. Your contract provision isn't going to override a state policy that punishes any company that admits there's a problem.
posted by 1adam12 at 7:15 AM on December 1, 2020 [9 favorites]

The existence of the provisions in contracts and independent monitoring doesn't mean that forced labour couldn't still enter their supply chains. I don't see the issue with making the final producer liable for their supply chain. They may be able to seek contribution or indemnity from their suppliers or even the independent auditors but if I'm buying something from Nike then as far as I'm concerned the buck stops with them.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 7:16 AM on December 1, 2020 [11 favorites]

Now there are probably deeper layers to this; and that counterpoint from the companies probably is not quite that simple either. In the spirit of moving beyond outrage Internet political discourse maybe we can talk about these complexities and explore them a bit.

Maybe. But at the same time it's not like the situation in Xinjiang specifically, or China's human rights record in general, or the record of companies like Foxconn, have only just come to light. These companies have so much clout they could use to deal with "opaque" suppliers. They've had so much time to implement completely different supply chains. They have so much money to investigate and enforce and relocate and insist on high wages and good working conditions and low environmental impact. And yet they always seem to be reacting to every new attempt to establish basic standards instead of being in the forefront, and always in the same way.

Apple has been sitting on cash reserves of more than $200 billion for years. I find it hard to believe that the Australian Strategic Policy Institute spent anywhere near that amount of money doing the investigations that linked Apple to forced labor programs. I'm pretty sure that if Apple wanted to know exactly what their partners and contractors were doing, they would.

The US Senate isn't currently a body I trust to act in pure good faith where China is concerned, but the things these companies are lobbying for -- more time, lighter disclosure requirements -- are demands that might make sense from smaller, less rich, less powerful actors. Not so much from these guys.

While I agree that internet outrage is often not a great thing, I'm not sure what force exists to make these companies do even marginally better other than the specter of mass outrage and damage to their PR.
posted by trig at 7:22 AM on December 1, 2020 [33 favorites]

I’m just really glad we have more people here defending Apple than we do denouncing slavery. I’m sure Apple with their immense cash reserves are doing everything possible to treat their manufacturing base fairly.

/s since it’s 2020
posted by Drumhellz at 8:38 AM on December 1, 2020 [12 favorites]

I'm sorry Drumbellz but that's kinda a shitty take on the discussion so far. I'm not sure anyone has really defended Apple's right to make money at any costs... at the worst I read a couple of comments suggesting that it's not a simple situation to legislate. Granted there haven't been many contributions but your comment is kinda a discussion killer.

I mean I'd always hope that we don't need to establish that we think that slavery is bad... but then again maybe it might be better if we all do say it more often... So yeah things need to change for the Uyghur and for others in similar situations, and those aiding the situation need to be held responsible as we're well beyond the time where they can claim any ignorance.

Possibly we can agree that the garbage that these big corporations do in the name of profit has to change. And while it's definitely governments that will need to fix this I agree with trig that the US Senate isn't really bursting with good faith right now.
posted by cirhosis at 9:31 AM on December 1, 2020 [5 favorites]

Best I can tell, the good-faith opposition to this legislature would be that it's tantamount to making it impossible to work with China, period. China is making it nigh-impossible to investigate these matters, and the supply chains inevitably lead to Uyghur exploitation.

But, well, if China's committed to that tack, then the only moral thing is to stop doing business with China.
posted by explosion at 9:58 AM on December 1, 2020 [26 favorites]

I mean if you want to call my take shitty for thinking we should absolutely be centering discussions of powerful multinational corporations around the horrific human rights violations they enable and profit from... you do you then. I’ll dip out of the thread either way because I don’t think I’m welcome.
posted by Drumhellz at 10:54 AM on December 1, 2020 [2 favorites]

I spent some time looking at the two bills HR6210 and HR6270 to see how they changed between introduction and passage. One thing that changed in 6210 was it originally included a list of companies who had been caught. Those are omitted from the version sent to the Senate:

(7) According to public reports, the following companies are or have been suspected of directly employing forced labor or sourcing from suppliers that are suspected of using forced labor: Adidas, Badger Sportswear, Calvin Klein, Campbell Soup Company, Coca-Cola Company, COFCO Tunhe Company, Costco, Esquel Group, Esprit, H&M, Hetian Taida, Huafu Fashion Company, Kraft Heinz Company, Litai Textiles, Nike, Inc., Patagonia, Inc., Tommy Hilfiger, Urumqi Shengshi Huaer Culture Technology Company, Yili Zhuo Wan Garment Manufacturing Company, and Zhihui Haipai Internet of Things Technology Company.

However the a new enforcement strategy section requires that Customs provide a public list of companies that get caught by this legislation as part of regular reports to Congress. I also noticed that under the exceptions listed in section 8.f a whole clause that said this didn't apply to "goods" was removed.

Given these two bills overwhelming support and talk of evil corporate lobbyists working to undermine the bill; I assumed the bills would have been watered down substantially; but so far it seems like very little has been changed.

They did add another section to push back on the US Chamber as well

(4) Audits and efforts to vet products and supply chains in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region are unreliable due to the extent forced labor has been integrated into the regional economy, the mixing of involuntary labor with voluntary labor, the inability of witnesses to speak freely about working conditions given government surveillance and coercion, and the incentive of government officials to conceal government-sponsored forced labor.

posted by interogative mood at 10:55 AM on December 1, 2020 [3 favorites]

Future generations are going to look back on our current relations with China the same way we look back on the world's relations with late 1930s Germany ("How could they have not known?" "Why didn't they do something?").
posted by ElKevbo at 10:57 AM on December 1, 2020 [7 favorites]

Agreed... a whole pile of world governments are trying to treat China as both the 'obvious villain of the piece' so they can drive their own base, while simultaneously trying to slide up to them and make sweet trade deals.

China really is using the world situation to make themselves into one of the big players while seeming to take the negative side in all the arguments. From human rights, income inequality, environmental issues and the list goes on and on.

And everyone is too busy dealing with their own crap to counter it effectively.

Its depressing to think that such a huge percentage of the people who end up in power, from such a variety of routes, money, communism, democracy, fame, everything. They all end up making the morally wrong choices.
posted by cirhosis at 11:52 AM on December 1, 2020

Our options with China are very limited. They are 1/4 of the world population and one of the largest economies, if not the largest. In contrast 1930s Germany was forth in Europe behind Britain, France and the USSR and from a population standpoint tiny compared to the United States and USSR.

We’ve made efforts on China; but they are highly resistant to our pressure: Nixon, Ford, Reagan and HW Bush tried to get them to open their economy and free their markets with the idea that a rising middle class would lead to a more democratic country. Then HW Bush and early Clinton era approaches post Tianamen were to isolate them internationally and pressure them. Eventually we went back to the market approach and getting them to participate in things like the WTO. W and Obama tried to build an economic block to contain and pressure them — aka TPP. Trump tried tariffs and a trade wars. All those approaches failed. As we learned in the Korean War China is a very strong and independent country that will not be pressured.
posted by interogative mood at 1:44 PM on December 1, 2020 [2 favorites]

As we learned in the Korean War China is a very strong and independent country that will not be pressured

Eh, that realization goes on before the Korean War. When Washington was surprised that the US-backed Chiang Kai Shek lost the Chinese Civil War in '49, the foreign policy establishment asked itself, "Who Lost China?". And speaking of Chiang, both the US and China were part of the ALLIES in WW2 and based on the acrimonious bickering between Vinegar Joe and the Gimo, I'm sure the US government recognized China as "independent" back then too.

And to go back further, there's Americans like Pearl S Buck basically seeing Chinese folks as wanting to be good 'ole God-fearing Americans. And the final and maybe ur-example, there's the Unequal Treaties of the 19th century, which basically gave the imperial powers each a piece of China to manage how they saw fit, literally colonizing parts of China.
posted by FJT at 3:00 PM on December 1, 2020

Future generations are going to look back on our current relations with China the same way we look back on the world's relations with late 1930s Germany ("How could they have not known?" "Why didn't they do something?").

I really hope future generations aren’t brainwashed enough to wonder why the country that elected a white supremacist, killer-cop loving internet troll didn’t “do something”
posted by moorooka at 5:32 PM on December 1, 2020 [2 favorites]

W and Obama tried to build an economic block to contain and pressure them — aka TPP

Well, to be fair, we don't know if the TPP would have worked because it never came to fruition. Whether it would be possible to try TPP 2.0, well, things didn't look good for it before Trump spent four years further stoking up the hatred of globalization and dislodging the USA's status as a stable trade partner.
posted by Anonymous at 6:48 PM on December 1, 2020

I don't think a TTP 2.0 is going to fly since that void has been filled by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations signed in November.
posted by bdc34 at 7:13 PM on December 1, 2020 [2 favorites]

I really hope future generations aren’t brainwashed enough to wonder why the country that elected a white supremacist, killer-cop loving internet troll didn’t “do something”

In any case, “doing something” would likely involve nuclear weapons, so ironically future generations would only have the opportunity to wonder anything at all if the West doesn’t try to force their hand.
posted by sideshow at 9:09 PM on December 1, 2020

When Washington was surprised that the US-backed Chiang Kai Shek lost the Chinese Civil War in '49, the foreign policy establishment asked itself, "Who Lost China?". And speaking of Chiang, both the US and China were part of the ALLIES in WW2...

You're probably aware, but I can never help myself from pointing out that this story get even “better”. Part of our “backing” of our WWII “ally” China was, as Truman simply openly stated in his memoir, to take “defeated”, “retreating” Japanese troops (arrgh sprained my scare-quote finger), keep them armed, and re-deploy them inside China against Chinese Communist forces in the Chinese Civil War:

It was perfectly clear to us that if we told the Japanese to lay down their arms immediately and march to the seaboard, the entire country would be taken over by the Communists. We therefore had to take the unusual step of using the enemy as a garrison until we could airlift Chinese National troops to South China and send [U.S.] Marines to guard the seaports.

So not only did we directly intervene in the Chinese Civil War, we actually used the Imperial Japanese troops who had been invading and occupying the country for the preceding decade and a half and testing out biological and chemical weapons on the population and all sorts of other stuff, to carry out that intervention.

And then we granted the guy who coordinated the weapons testing on the populace an immunity from prosecution at the Tokyo war crimes tribunals so our military could bring him to the U.S. and benefit from the expertise he'd gained. And when our side didn't win the war in China we leveraged our military power and nuclear threat to set up Taiwan as a consolation prize for the Nationalists.

At the same time, FDR and Truman and I believe Eisenhower all contemporarily used the term “concentration camp” to refer to the places where we rounded up Asian-American “non-aliens”/citizens, which we now refer to euphemistically as “internment camps” instead.

So that's the moral high ground we would've started from in criticizing China for Xinjiang and the most recent treatment of Uyghurs, in an alternate timeline. But then we elected a Nazi president.

Not that we shouldn't officially condemn China here, not at all, but sheesh if we could try to maintain one iota of credibility by acknowledging the timber in our own eye once in a while it'd be nice.
posted by XMLicious at 7:55 AM on December 2, 2020 [5 favorites]

I don't think a TTP 2.0 is going to fly since that void has been filled by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations signed in November.

Well, yeah. There are a ton of reasons a TPP 2.0 is not going to happen.
posted by Anonymous at 6:39 PM on December 2, 2020

On the other hand, Apple has pretty much vacated China for Vietnam, and is encouraging its suppliers to follow suit to Southeast Asia. Vietnam ain't great, hell Singapore ain't great, but they're way better than.
posted by Slap*Happy at 10:16 PM on December 2, 2020