Guest Post: Make the Forced Labor 301 Tariffs a Win for Workers
This a guest post by Charita Libao Castro, PhD, MSW, a former deputy assistant U.S. trade representative for labor affairs, where she served as the global forced labor lead
“I had to store my friend’s dead body in the freezer.” A fisher shared this with me and my colleagues at the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) through an interpreter. “Every time I opened it to store the catch, I saw his body until we finally reached shore.” His friend had worked extreme hours for months under abusive conditions, without a single port of call. When he fell ill, he did not receive the medical treatment he needed. The vessel never diverted for his care, or to bring his body home. It kept to its schedule.
What the fisher described was forced labor as defined by the International Labor Organization (ILO) Convention 29 on Forced Labor, 1930:
“all work or service which is exacted from any person under the menace of any penalty and for which the said person has not offered himself voluntarily.”
The fisher was part of a delegation of forced labor survivors from distant-water fishing vessels that a labor rights organization accompanied to Washington, DC, in 2025. They were brought to the agency to meet with us, tell their stories, and offer solutions for preventing forced labor. The fishers understood that trade enforcement done right could protect workers like them.
Trade policy can be a force for good in workers’ lives. I know because I spent 25 years as a senior government official advancing labor rights at the intersection of trade and labor, including combating child labor and forced labor. As deputy assistant U.S. trade representative for labor affairs, I led the global forced labor portfolio before my retirement from federal service.
I carried that portfolio under Ambassador Katherine Tai’s worker-centered trade policy. It was a policy built on years of advocacy by the labor and anti-trafficking community to link trade and labor rights. Under her leadership, we secured the first G7 Trade Ministers’ Statement on Forced Labor and the only U.S. government trade strategy on forced labor. Under Ambassador Jamieson Greer, I helped negotiate forced labor protections into Agreements on Reciprocal Trade, which trading partners signed to secure relief from tariffs imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. I watched him hold the line on labor rights provisions. I was still at USTR when the pivot to Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974 took place earlier this year, but left before that work went further.
Pretext or Principle?
You did not need to be on the inside to know forced labor was not the real problem driving the 301 tariffs, levied on 60 economies, made effective July 24. After the Supreme Court struck down the “Liberation Day” tariffs in February, temporary tariffs under Section 122 served as a stopgap measure lasting 150 days. Those Section 122 duties were set to expire on the same day that Section 301 emerged as the replacement tool for the same set of tariffs. Unfair trade practices related to “failure to impose and effectively enforce” a forced labor import ban (“import ban”) became the new legal justification.
Worker organizations have long called for Section 301 to address labor rights as an unfair trade practice. Congress made denial of worker rights an actionable unfair trade practice in 1988. The AFL-CIO filed Section 301 petitions against China in 2004 and 2006. USTR declined to accept either petition. It is not surprising, then, that many beyond labor advocates see the use of Section 301 as pretext. They watched the sequence of tariff justifications unfold in real time.
The USTR fact sheet claims President Trump is “tackling modern-day slavery at its source.” In one sense, that is defensible. USTR is requiring trading partners to block goods made with forced labor. In another sense, it is disingenuous. USTR’s tariffs are designed to incentivize a government to “impose and effectively enforce” a forced labor import ban. But according to its notice of action, USTR carved out a set of exemptions. Among those exemptions, USTR will forgo tariff leverage if the product cannot be “grown or produced in sufficient quantities or at reasonable prices in the United States or obtained from other sources,” regardless of whether tariffing it would pressure a government to act. While not the same, the Section 301 tariff consumptive demand exemption echoes the Section 307 consumptive demand clause, which gutted the Tariff Act of 1930’s forced labor import ban for 85 years until advocates won its repeal in 2015.
Creating a High-Standard Remedy
These tariffs face lawsuits. Whether or not one agrees with these tariffs, the transformation of the forced labor import ban landscape has been swift. Governments are taking action to adopt and enforce forced labor import bans. As of August 5, 2026, 25 governments and the European Union have import bans on the books or on the way, many moving quickly to avoid tariffs. But speed should not supersede a systemic approach to designing these bans.
Ending forced labor is shared work, and the labor community’s energy and expertise are essential to turn commitments on paper into enforcement in practice. Advocates remember what happens when a well-intentioned trade measure harms the people it was meant to protect. The U.S. Child Labor Deterrence Act of 1992, otherwise known as the “Harkin Bill,” proposed a ban on imports made with child labor. In the fall of 1993, expecting it to pass, the Bangladeshi garment industry dismissed tens of thousands of working children, with documented cases of children ending up in more exploitative conditions. That bill never became law. If these tariffs are to stay in place, they must work for workers.
If the Section 301 tariffs are to be a credible deterrent, they must incorporate the lessons of the labor community. USTR should insist that governments build those lessons into their own approach. As Martina Vandenberg, President of the Human Trafficking Legal Center, and Ayla Francis Foster, Director for Policy & Government Relations at Humanity United Action, noted in their MS NOW opinion piece, “When forced labor import bans are real, they make it possible to envision a world without any safe harbor for goods tainted with forced labor.”
USTR should set a high standard for the Section 301 remedy floor with a transparent offramp to zero tariffs and benchmarks that governments can meet. Drawing on U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s Forced Labor Enforcement Operational Guidance for Importers, Laura Murphy’s An International Blueprint for Forced Labor Import Bans, and the ILO Protocol of 2014 to the Forced Labor Convention, 1930, the remedy should, at a minimum, require evidence-based priority targeting of goods, clear and specific evidentiary thresholds, and a public list of implicated entities. It should also fund enforcement and require remediation that corrects labor violations, including back pay, regardless of migration status. Lower rates should go only to economies that recognize U.S. determinations of high-risk goods, act on them, and demonstrate that forced labor goods have been stopped at the border.
Enforce Existing Trade Authorities
Existing trade authorities to combat forced labor also need consistent and timely enforcement. The Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act entity list had remained unchanged since January 2025 until the U.S. Department of Homeland Security added 43 companies on July 31, 2026. The politicization that led to lifting the Section 307 Withhold Release Order blocking Central Romana sugar, as New York Times reporting showed, should never have occurred. Slashed staff and funding for labor rights and anti-trafficking programs that level the playing field for both American workers and those abroad must be restored at the border and at the “source” itself: the recruitment corridors and workplaces where exploitation begins. Reckless disregard for forced labor throughout global supply chains requires consequences at home and abroad.
This Moment Is for the Labor and Anti-Trafficking Movement
The recent commemoration of World Day Against Trafficking in Persons is a reminder to the labor and anti-trafficking community: claim this moment and make it a win for workers. Many feel sidelined as governments rush out import bans to avoid tariffs, without consulting workers or the advocates who spent years learning what makes them work. That frustration is fair. That said, the cause belongs to the movement that has pushed for decades to protect workers from and through trade. Governments and businesses must be held to account — to protect, to respect, and to remedy — as laid out in the United Nation Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights.
For more than a century dating back to the Keating-Owen Child Labor Act of 1916, survivors, workers, organizers, and unions have fought to keep goods made with abusive labor out of American commerce. They marched in the Global March Against Child Labor for the ratification of ILO Convention 182 on the Worst Forms of Child Labor. They filled the streets at the Battle of Seattle in 1999 to demand that trade not ignore working people. They wrote enforceable labor provisions into free trade agreements, including the hard-won Rapid Response Mechanism in the United States-Mexico-Canada trade agreement. They won the passage of the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act. They then took it global, winning their fight to press the European Union to shut its market to forced labor goods. The labor and anti-trafficking movement built the foundation these tariffs rest on. That history is why they should not yield now.
The stakes are high. Whether on sea or land, workers and children find themselves working involuntarily under coercive conditions. The ILO, Walk Free, and the International Organization for Migration estimate 28 million people are in forced labor on any given day. The worker who died at sea was one of them. The fisher honored his friend’s memory by sharing his testimony with us. We can honor their bravery by demanding these tariffs be used legitimately, and that a remedy be designed for the workers it pledged to protect.
Charita Libao Castro, PhD, MSW, is a former deputy assistant U.S. trade representative for labor affairs, where she served as the global forced labor lead