The Debate | Opinion | East Asia

US Tariffs Won’t End Forced Labor, But They Can Change the Incentives That Drive It  

Properly designed and tied to labor-based risk, U.S. tariffs could change the incentives that sustain labor abuse, especially in China. 

In early June, the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative released its recommendations under a Section 301 investigation of 60 economies over their alleged “failure to impose and effectively enforce a prohibition on the importation of goods produced with forced labor.” The current proposal has a central flaw: it evaluates trading partners by only one criterion, namely, whether they prohibit and enforce restrictions on trade in goods made with forced labor. It does not take into account the risk of forced labor within each country’s own production system. 

As a result, USTR recommended that China receive the same 12.5 percent tariff as Japan, Australia, Norway, and Switzerland, despite fundamental differences in the scale, institutional entrenchment, and global reach of its suppression of labor standards. No credible risk-based framework would treat these countries alike.

The Section 301 proposal seeks to address trade distortions, but it remains an incomplete solution. If the goal is a fairer global trading system, policy must also address one of the underlying causes of those distortions: the long-standing repression of labor in production itself. 

In my view, Section 301 tariffs cannot directly or immediately improve working conditions in the targeted economies; they are not a substitute for labor enforcement. At most, they force governments and firms to confront the true cost of their production model. These economies have little incentive to raise labor standards on their own because much of their competitive advantage rests on suppressing them. A tariff does no more than raise the cost of access to the U.S. market. But where that advantage depends on keeping labor costs artificially low, raising those costs is precisely the lever that matters. 

The USTR has already recognized that countries that fail to eliminate forced labor gain a cost advantage at the expense of law-abiding firms and American workers. China is the largest beneficiary of that advantage because of the scale of its manufacturing economy. Yet the current proposal applies the same tariff rate to China as to countries with far lower systemic risk, undermining the incentive structure the tariff is meant to create. 

China should face a higher tariff rate because it poses a high labor risk and occupies a dominant position in global manufacturing. The two compound each other: The same labor-cost suppression that would distort competition anywhere does far more damage when it operates at China’s scale. Under a uniform, objective, and risk-based framework, a higher tariff rate for China would follow naturally. 

Let me cite just one example. Despite years of repeated public commitments by Apple and its supplier, Foxconn, to improve labor conditions at China-based factories, our most recent investigation in 2025 found that little had changed at Foxconn’s Zhengzhou campus, which employed more than 200,000 workers at its peak. Employees commonly worked six or seven days a week, often exceeding 70 hours, while wages were delayed or partially withheld, making it difficult for them to leave the factory.

Some argue that workers chose these conditions, but that argument ignores the institutional constraints shaping workers’ choices. In China, rural livelihoods are no longer sufficient to support many families, forcing millions to migrate for work. The hukou system further separates migrant workers from their families and leaves them without equal access to urban social protection. These structural conditions produce working conditions that correspond to several internationally recognized indicators of forced labor, including abuse of workers’ economic vulnerability, excessive overtime, the........

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