The United States has launched investigations into the economies of 60 countries — including the European Union, Brazil and Angola — to determine whether they have taken “sufficient measures” to prevent the importation of goods produced with forced labour.
“Governments have not imposed or effectively enforced measures to prohibit the entry into their markets of products made with forced labour,” said White House trade representative Jamieson Greer.
In a statement released on Thursday, Greer said that “for too long” the United States has been “forced to compete with foreign producers who may have an artificial cost advantage,” expressing confidence that the investigations will demonstrate “how the failure to eradicate these abominable practices” harms American companies and workers.
The investigations aim to determine whether the “acts, policies and practices” of each economy are “unreasonable or discriminatory” and constitute a “burden or restriction” on US trade.
The list includes some of the world’s largest economies, such as China, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Israel, Canada, Australia, Russia, South Korea, the United Kingdom and Mexico.
On Wednesday, the US government had launched a separate trade investigation into industrial production in foreign countries, aimed at circumventing the Supreme Court’s rejection of president Donald Trump’s use of economic emergency powers to impose tariff surcharges.
The investigations are being launched under the Trade Act of 1974, which could eventually lead to new import tariffs, though Greer declined to anticipate the outcome of the process. The first investigations, he said, “will focus on economies where evidence appears to point to structural overcapacity.”
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“The policy remains the same — the tools may change, depending on the vicissitudes of the courts and other things,” Greer said on a call with journalists, stressing that the underlying objective was to protect American jobs.
While in force, the tariff surcharges struck down by the Supreme Court generated $166 billion (€143.8 billion) in federal government revenue, which may now be reimbursed. Trump and his team have acknowledged that the new process — using different laws to establish new tariffs — is intended to replace the hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue lost following the Supreme Court’s February ruling.
Immediately after that ruling, the government imposed 10% tariffs on foreign goods under the Trade Act of 1974, but these tariffs expire after 150 days, on July 24. Trump has said he planned to raise this import rate to 15%, but has not yet done so.
