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In the 80 days since the Supreme Court overturned one set of tariffs, fashion brands have been caught somewhere between looking forward to the corresponding refunds and bracing for whatever’s next.
And what’s next, it seems, is more tariffs — and they could land in the next couple of months. This time, they’ll be tied to forced labor.
“You’ve always had discussions about banning things made with forced labor; that’s fine,” says Gail Strickler, president for global trade at consultancy Brookfield Associates and former assistant US trade representative for textiles. But this time, the ban wouldn’t just be on products entering the United States. “If you’re a major brand or retailer tracing your cotton from a factory in Bangladesh and making sure it’s not Uyghur cotton, it doesn’t matter. What they’re saying is, we’re going to look at all of Bangladesh to see if the country is enforcing a ban on Uyghur cotton.”
As part of a new investigation designed to examine how well US trading partners are keeping forced labor out of their supply chains, the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) is currently evaluating whether it can impose Section 301 tariffs on countries that aren’t doing such a great job. While President Trump had previously imposed Section 301 reciprocal tariffs under the outmoded International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), which the Supreme Court ruled in February he couldn’t invoke, forced labor is the new avenue he’s taking to reinstate the previous tariffs.
The stopgap Section 122 10% tariffs that were upheld by the Supreme Court are slated to expire on July 24, and a lull between that and the next batch is unlikely. “I anticipate by July 24, we’ll see these new tariffs announced, maybe even before,” says Julia K. Hughes, president of the United States Fashion Industry Association (USFIA).
There are 60 countries on Trump’s latest target list — which spans all of fashion’s key producers, including Bangladesh, China, and Vietnam, and accounts for more than 99% of US imports. It’s “the broadest tariff trigger ever used under Section 301”, Strickler says, and it could lead to across-the-board tariffs on imports from so-deemed non-compliant countries. Textiles and apparel are at the greatest risk.
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If any workers making clothing, accessories, or raw materials are made to work against their will, or under conditions where they can’t leave freely, either because of threats, debt, withheld wages, or confiscated documents, that’s considered forced labor. While many brands still struggle to identify their tier 3 suppliers, this new ruling would mean that, for everything that goes into their clothing, they’d need to be sure their supplier country, and their supplier’s supplier country, can be certain that nothing they’re using is being made with forced labor.
It’s complicated in a way that seems designed to ensure the tariffs take effect. According to Strickler, the new tariff angle gives the president a different way to accomplish “whatever he wants to do on tariffs with any specific country.”
A misguided solution
While most in fashion are aligned on the goal of eliminating forced labor, Hughes says tariffs aren’t the right remedy.
When Uzbekistan was found to have forced labor in its supply chain, fashion’s response was direct and effective. The Cotton Campaign’s 2010 Uzbek Cotton Pledge got more than 300 companies on board to boycott cotton from the country. NGOs, human rights groups, and labor advocates added to the pressure, making Uzbekistan’s lapse both a reputational and an economic problem. The country responded with labor reforms and increased traceability, and was able to recover some of its lost business.
Tariffs are too indirect to be similarly effective, says Hughes. Forced labor risk is often embedded deep upstream, while tariffs hit the import transaction at the border. Imposing tariffs doesn’t necessarily create a clean break with tainted supply or require traceability either. And for the pressure of punitive duties to work, the economic pain has to exceed the cost of changing labor practices.
The tariff may be high enough to effect change, but whether it adequately addresses forced labor remains to be seen. Certainly, fashion will take a hit either way. The new tariffs are intended to replace the previous Section 301 reciprocal tariff and could similarly reach as high as 25%, depending on the country. Looking at Europe specifically, where forced labor standards are often tougher than in the US, a big question, Hughes said, is whether the EU will be hit by this.
“It’s hard to read the tea leaves,” Hughes adds. “I would expect that there would be different tariffs for different countries since there’s a focus on some countries more than others.”
In case there wasn’t yet enough for fashion to concern itself with, there’s another Section 301 investigation currently underway at USTR, and hearings just wrapped Friday. This one is looking at whether countries are producing so much that it’s harming US commerce. Again, Bangladesh, China, Vietnam, India, and others are on the chopping block. If the US decides those countries’ practices are “unreasonable”, according to USTR, that could mean a separate tariff above and beyond the forced labor one. Combined, these two investigations are intended to yield at least the same tariff rate as the reciprocal 301 and “maybe higher”, says Hughes.
At the end of April, USTR also released its annual Special 301 Report, looking at the global state of intellectual property protection. In it, they named Vietnam as a target they could open a case against for IP violations. The US is “ratcheting up the pressure on Vietnam”, says Hughes, adding that this could serve as yet another avenue for the administration to raise tariffs on the second largest supplier of clothing to the US.
“They’re looking for all mechanisms to be able to have the threat of tariffs,” says Hughes. “We don’t really have any indicators of where this might go.”
