Both houses of Congress have passed the Uyghur Forced Labor Protection Act, which bans imports from the Xinjiang region in northwest China, an area known for using slave labor for U.S. products.
President Biden has stated he will sign the legislation into law.
Xinjiang is the region where China has imprisoned more than a million Uyghurs, a minority group of Muslims who are subjected to imprisonment and torture by their communist, atheistic country. China routinely puts those political prisoners to work, too, including tens of thousands of Uyghurs who are shipped across the country to work half-starved on a factory floor or return to a jail cell if they refuse.
Wendy Wright of Christian Freedom International says any product that comes from the Xinjiang area was presumably made from slave labor. So the Labor Protection Act, she says, bans any of those products from making it to U.S. shores.
In fact, according to an Associated Press story about the Labor Protection Act, the bill states that any product from that region was presumably made by slave labor and U.S. companies must prove it is not.
The story did not state how those companies are required to do so, however, since those same companies now claim they monitor labor practices already.
Corporations claim clueless
Mega-corporations in the U.S. are routinely busted for using slave labor for their products, and then claim ignorance and insist they are outraged. But report after report suggests their only remorse for using human slaves is getting caught doing so.
An investigation from 2019 uncovered seven suppliers for Apple used labor by Uyghur Muslims who made circuit boards, antennas, and internal cables, Business Insider reported earlier this year.
In a gut-punching story at National Review Online, senior editor Jay Nordlinger recalled the story of Dr. Charles Lee, a Falun Gong member who was imprisoned by China’s authorities for three years. He worked in a prison sweatshop where he made Christmas lights and bedroom slippers featuring Homer Simpson.
“Oh, they just want the cheapest product,” Lee, now safely in the U.S., said of American citizens. “But I feel that, if they knew about my situation, it would bother them.”
Wright says other American companies that have profited from the forced labor in China include Nike, Disney, and the NBA.
“This is a warning shot to them as well,” she says, “that they need to back off from profiting from modern-day slavery.”
