Xinhua News Agency, Beijing, August 9

The truth about the United States' implementation of forced labor in China

August 2022

Introduction

For some time, in order to discredit and contain China, the United States has concocted the so-called "genocide" and "forced labor" in Xinjiang, formulated and implemented the "Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Law", slandered the human rights situation in Xinjiang, and undermined the development of people's livelihood in Xinjiang. In fact, forced labor is completely fabricated in Xinjiang, while for the United States, it is a stubborn disease that has existed since the founding of the country, still exists widely today, and even becomes more serious.

This report objectively records what the United States has done on the issue of forced labor from multiple perspectives of history and reality, China and the world, with the aim of clarifying the facts, fighting back the lies, and letting the world know what forced labor is and who is doing it. Let the lies have nowhere to hide and nowhere to escape in the face of facts.

1. Forced labor has a clear definition in international law

Since the 1930s, a series of conventions, protocols and other documents have established a clear definition and identification criteria for forced labor in international law.

The core standards of the International Labor Organization on forced labor include: the Forced Labor Convention, 1930 (Convention No. 29, ratified by 179 member states as of the end of 2021), the Abolition of Forced Labor Convention, 1957 (Convention No. 105, ratified by 176 member states as of the end of 2021) and the 2014 Protocol to the Forced Labor Convention, 1930 (ratified by 59 member states as of the end of 2021).

The Forced Labor Convention, 1930 stipulates that forced labor refers to "all work or service performed by any person under the menace of any penalty and not voluntarily by the person concerned". The three elements of "involuntary", "threat of penalty" and "work or service" must be met to constitute forced labor.

According to statistics from the International Labor Organization, the United States has only ratified 14 international labor conventions, making it one of the member states with the fewest ratifications. Of the 10 core conventions, the United States has only ratified two, and has not yet ratified the 1930 Forced Labor Convention.

China has ratified 28 international labor conventions, and in April 2022, it ratified the 1930 Forced Labor Convention and the 1957 Abolition of Forced Labor Convention. China actively fulfills its obligations under various international conventions, and through legislation, policy formulation and implementation, it effectively protects the rights of workers and opposes forced labor. Chinese law explicitly prohibits forced labor, and Article 244 of the Criminal Law stipulates the crime of forced labor. Workers of all ethnic groups in Xinjiang choose their occupations according to their own wishes, and in accordance with the Labor Law, the Labor Contract Law and other laws and regulations, on the basis of equality, voluntariness and consensus, they freely enter into labor contracts with employers and obtain corresponding remuneration and rights protection. Governments at all levels in Xinjiang also provide necessary vocational skills training for workers who voluntarily sign up. Workers of all ethnic groups have complete freedom to choose their occupations. They go where they want and do what they want. They have never been threatened with punishment, and their personal freedom has never been restricted. There is no forced labor in Xinjiang.

Second, forced labor is inseparable from the history of the founding of the United States

The slave trade is the original sin of the United States. At the beginning of the founding of the United States, the huge wealth created by the blood and tears of millions of black slaves sold to the United States helped the United States complete the original accumulation of capital.

As a country with only 246 years of history, the "legal" duration of slavery in the United States actually accounted for one-third of the history of the founding of the country. According to the "Transatlantic Slave Trade Database", in the history of the slave trade, there were at least 36,000 "slave expeditions" between 1514 and 1866. According to data from the German Statista Research Company, in 1790, there were nearly 700,000 black slaves in the United States, and by 1860, the total number exceeded 3.95 million, while there were less than 490,000 free African Americans in the United States.

Black slaves were forced to work at the bottom of society under harsh working conditions. They were poorly clothed, hungry, and cruelly exploited. Many were even tortured to death. Many of these black slaves were forced to work in the cotton industry. As the American writer Edward Baptiste wrote in his book "The Hidden Original Sin: Slavery and the Rise of American Capitalism", whips drove slaves to devote all their physical strength and most of their energy to cotton picking, which made the cotton picking faster and faster. Under the harsh coercion of slave owners, by 1860, the cotton production in the United States reached 130 times that of 1800. The rapid increase in cotton production was soaked in the blood and tears of black slaves.

According to statistics, the labor value squeezed from black slaves by American slave owners was as high as 14 trillion US dollars at current prices. According to "James Madison's Montpelier", the official website of the former residence of the fourth president of the United States, James Madison, the slave economy was once the main engine driving the US economy. From tobacco planting in Virginia to shipbuilding in Rhode Island, they are all related to the slave economy. In 1850, 80% of US exports were produced by slaves. Harvard historian Sven Beckett pointed out that the way for the prosperity of the United States and the West is slavery, not democracy.

When tracing the history of slavery in the United States, the non-profit news organization "Dialogue" mentioned that "convict slaves" and "real estate slaves" existed at the same time since the end of the 18th century. In Virginia, where the largest number of blacks were imprisoned, prisoners were declared "dead souls" and "state slaves." It was not until the early 20th century that states stopped renting out convicts to farmers and industrial and commercial operators as cheap labor for railways, roads and coal mines. In Georgia, the cessation of renting out convicts in 1907 actually caused economic shocks to many industries such as brickmaking and mining, and many companies went bankrupt.

According to historical records, by the end of the 1860s, hundreds of thousands of Chinese workers had participated in the construction of American railways. At first, batches of poor farmers from China boarded the ship known as the "floating hell", huddled in the cabin like sardines in a can, drifted on the sea for about two months and arrived in California, USA to work as coolies. On the way, the death rate was as high as 64.21% due to inhuman treatment, typhoons, and infectious diseases. The Chinese workers who were lucky enough to come to the United States suffered from racial discrimination. Under the whip of white supervisors, it took only 7 years to build the railway that was originally planned to be completed in 14 years. Historians described that "there is a Chinese corpse buried under every sleeper."

3. The United States and China have a long history of forced labor

For many years, the US government has deliberately evaded its labor protection responsibilities, resulting in prisoners in private prisons becoming "slave laborers", widespread abuse of child labor, and shocking forced labor in the agricultural field. It can be called a "modern slavery" country.

(I) Prisons are the hardest hit areas of forced labor in the United States

The United States is a veritable prison country. According to a report by the Prison Policy Initiative, a US public policy think tank, there are about 2 million prisoners in 102 federal prisons, 1,566 state prisons, 2,850 local detention centers, 1,510 juvenile detention centers, 186 immigration detention centers, 82 indigenous detention centers, and military prisons. The US population accounts for less than 5% of the world's total population, but the prison population accounts for a quarter of the world's prison population. It is the country with the highest incarceration rate and the largest number of prisoners in the world.

Although the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution nominally protects citizens from forced labor, it excludes criminal prisoners. The US prison system abuses the 13th Amendment to legalize forced labor for prisoners. There are a large number of prison laborers among the inmates of the US federal and local prisons, who are engaged in daily maintenance work in the prison system, including repairs, cooking, facility cleaning, and laundry, most of whom are black and people of color. Other prisoners are outsourced to public projects or hired by companies to work in industries such as construction, road maintenance, forestry and funeral services. These jobs are either dirty and tiring or high-risk. Reuters revealed that Suniva, one of the largest solar panel manufacturers in the United States, uses prison labor to maintain low costs. The head of the company admitted that the company worked with the Federal Prison Industries Corporation (UNICOR) to move production lines back to the United States from Asia and obtained lucrative federal contracts.

According to a report by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), at least 30 states in the United States have listed serving prisoners as emergency labor for disasters and emergencies, and at least 14 states have hired prisoners to work in forest firefighting. Most prison laborers claim that they have never received formal job training, but often have to perform dangerous operations without meeting safety operating standards and lacking protective equipment, which often results in casualties, and the prisons have no clear records of these casualties. As early as 2015, the American magazine The Atlantic Monthly commented that "these outsourced prisoners are cheaper than slaves, after all, companies don't have to worry about their health."

The United States has actually formed a huge "prison-industrial complex", and private prisons operated under contracts with the US government have become a major source of forced labor in the United States. Laborers in private prisons in the United States are completely controlled by their employers and have no right to refuse to work. As many as 76% of the inmates interviewed said that once they are unable to work or refuse to work, they will be punished by the prison in various ways, such as solitary confinement, reduced family visits, and rejection of parole or commutation applications. In addition, inmates have no right to choose their jobs, and work assignments are entirely based on arbitrary, discriminatory and even punitive decisions made by prison administrators. Laura Appleman, a professor at the Willamette University School of Law in the United States, pointed out in a research report entitled "Blood Money: Prison Labor and Prison Profits" that private prisons are a "harmful form of slavery" and that inmates are "trapped in increasing physical labor, pain and exploitation."

For many years, private prisons in the United States have colluded with black-hearted politicians to force prisoners to work, turning private prisons into slavery-style "concentration camps" where they make a lot of money and exploit the poor. Due to the lack of supervision, prisoners who are forced to work have long working hours, poor conditions, meager wages, or are even forced to work for free. In early 2022, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit, pointing out that there are a lot of power-for-money transactions in the operation of detention facilities in private prisons in the United States, which has exacerbated the problems of over-incarceration and forced labor, and asked the U.S. Federal Marshals Service to provide relevant operator contract information and make it public.

The expenditure of U.S. prisons on paying prisoners' wages is less than 1% of the total budget, while the total value of products and services created by prison labor exceeds $11 billion each year. Because prisoners do not need labor rights and have low wages, large American companies have seriously abused prison labor. Private prisons that have signed contracts with the U.S. government make millions of dollars a year from forced labor of prisoners. As of May 2022, the average hourly wage in the United States was about $10.96, while the hourly wage of prison labor was less than $1. Moreover, many prison agencies have not increased the wages of prisoners for several years or even decades. In seven states, including Florida, most of the jobs assigned to prisoners are not paid for. In addition, the wages of many prisoners are deducted by the prison authorities for reasons such as "taxes, meals, prison fees and court appearance fees". More than 70% of the respondents cannot afford the basic living expenses during their sentences. During the COVID-19 epidemic, at least 40 states in the United States required prisoners to rush to make masks and hand sanitizers and other epidemic prevention materials, handle large amounts of medical waste generated by hospitals, move corpses, build coffins, and dig graves. However, prisoners engaged in these dangerous jobs are difficult to get corresponding protection. Since the outbreak of the epidemic, nearly one-third of prisoners in US prisons have been infected with COVID-19, and 3,000 people have died from lack of medical care or poor detention environment. The Los Angeles Times revealed that during the epidemic, thousands of prisoners in California prisons were forced to sew masks and make furniture under high-risk conditions. Even if a large number of confirmed cases appeared in the prison, the prison factory continued to operate as usual. Inmates were required to sew thousands of masks every day, but they could not get any. Prison staff also threatened inmates, saying that if they refused to work, their release would be affected.

(II) Forced labor against children and women is shocking

The problem of child labor in the United States has a long history. As early as more than 100 years ago, American mines, tobacco farms, and textile factories began to employ and exploit child labor. To this day, the United States is still the only country among the 193 member states of the United Nations that has not ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child, and the problem of employing child labor has not been resolved. According to statistics from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and other agencies, 50% of the 100,000 people trafficked from abroad to the United States for forced labor each year are minors.

According to the non-profit organization "American Farm Worker Employment Training Program", there are still about 500,000 child laborers in the United States engaged in agricultural labor. Many children start working at the age of 8 and work up to 72 hours a week. Child farm workers are exposed to hazardous chemicals such as pesticides for a long time. In addition, they need to operate sharp tools and heavy machinery, and due to the lack of necessary training and protective measures, they face a greater risk of work-related injuries. According to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, an estimated 907 teenagers died on U.S. farms between 1995 and 2002. According to The Washington Post, 452 children died in the United States from work-related injuries between 2003 and 2016, including 237 child laborers who died in agricultural accidents. According to a November 2018 report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office, 5.5% of child laborers work hard on farms, and half of the child labor deaths are in the agricultural sector. In many states in the United States, tobacco farms employ a large number of children to harvest and dry tobacco leaves, which causes great harm to their physical and mental health. Many children suffer from nicotine poisoning and are even found to have lung infections.

According to official U.S. statistics, in 2019, U.S. law enforcement officers found 858 child labor cases that violated the Fair Labor Standards Act, and 544 minors worked in dangerous occupations. The largest labor unions in the United States, the Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations, said that the U.S. Department of Labor only reports an average of 34 cases of illegal use of child labor each year, which is far lower than the actual number, exposing the serious lack of law enforcement capabilities of the U.S. labor department.

The Richmond Times-Dispatch reported that there are 240,000 to 325,000 women and children in the United States who are sexually enslaved. The U.S. non-governmental organization "End Slavery Now" said that a child trafficked into the sex industry "works" 12 hours a day and "works" 7 days a week, and can be squeezed out of $150,000 to $200,000 a year.

(III) Forced labor is ubiquitous in all walks of life in the United States

An article published on the website of the University of Denver in the United States revealed that at present, at least more than 500,000 people in the United States are living in modern slavery and forced to work. The phenomenon of forced labor in the United States is ubiquitous, and the problem of labor trafficking is particularly prominent in 23 industries or fields such as domestic work, agricultural planting, tourism sales, catering, medical and beauty services. In 2004, the Human Rights Research Center of the University of California, Berkeley, studied relevant cases from 1998 to 2003 and pointed out that there were tens of thousands of forced labor cases in the United States, which were spread across major towns and villages, and became the most hidden, inhumane, widespread and evil illegal trade base between the United States and China.

The current immigration law in the United States supports modern slavery. The temporary visa system for foreign workers in the United States legally binds workers to employers, making foreign workers inferior. Even if employers arbitrarily lower wages or extend working hours, employees dare not leave their jobs, otherwise they may be deported. This power imbalance between employers and employees is systematic, and there is evidence that the problem of forced labor in the United States is related to specific visa categories. A 2014 study by the Urban Institute and Northeastern University in the United States showed that more than 70% of the victims of forced labor in the United States held legal visas when they arrived in the United States. To end this modern slavery, it is necessary to reform the immigration laws of the United States, but the US Congress and the government lack the willingness to reform.

Major cities such as New York and Los Angeles are the headquarters of most "sweatshops" in the United States. These factories generally undertake the production and manufacturing of clothing, coffee, and electronic products. According to data from the U.S. Department of Labor, there are as many as 22,000 clothing sweatshops in the United States alone. In order to save costs and maximize profits, factory owners often use various means to exploit legal loopholes and evade government supervision; workers' wages and related welfare benefits are far below the legal standards, and long working hours or overtime are not compensated accordingly. In extreme cases, they may even be abused by their employers. Internal documents of the U.S. Department of Labor disclosed by the New York Times show that Vietnamese workers working in clothing factories in American Samoa complained that they were often beaten by security guards, and a female worker was blinded in the left eye by a security guard with a hard plastic pipe. In a food factory in Oklahoma, Indian workers are hungry, and many workers in the factory are severely malnourished and look like "walking zombies."

In the domestic service sector, the vast majority of service personnel are foreign immigrants and are not recognized as employees by U.S. law. U.S. immigration policy does not allow them to change their service objects at will, otherwise they will be deported. The vast majority of victims work in extremely poor conditions, their wages are in arrears or do not meet the minimum wage standard, they suffer violence, sexual assault or intimidation from their employers and their families, and are forbidden to complain to anyone, otherwise they will be deported. According to a 2014 report by the Urban Institute and Northeastern University in the United States, more than one-third of the victims of forced labor in the United States are domestic servants.

In the agricultural sector, 30% of farm workers and their families live below the federal poverty line, suffer threats or violence and are forced to work without being able to express their wishes. Immokalee, a small town in southwest Florida, is known as the "Tomato Capital" of the United States. There are 26,000 people living in the town, most of whom are farmers from Mexico, Guatemala, Haiti and other countries. The local minimum wage is $8.65 per hour, but they can actually only get $5.5 per hour, far from the minimum wage standard. The Guardian found that foreign workers working on corn farms in the United States are not protected by law and live in extremely poor conditions. They only receive $225 for working 12 hours a day and 15 days. They often face sexual assault, harassment, wage theft, work-related disability and death, and exposure to toxic chemicals. In 2017, independent American journalist Gina Marie published an investigative report titled "Forced Labor is More Common in the United States Than You Think," pointing out that on some farms in the United States, foreign farm workers are forced to sleep in sheds and box trucks. They pick agricultural products without wages, and if they try to escape, they will be beaten. According to a report by the Economic Policy Institute, seasonal agricultural workers in the United States often suffer wage exploitation and other abuses due to their immigration status and fear of retaliation and deportation, and are owed millions of dollars in wages each year. The U.S. Department of Labor's Wage and Hour Division is underfunded and understaffed, resulting in the protection and relief measures it can take for agricultural workers being just a drop in the bucket, which ultimately makes agricultural workers believe that reporting employer violations to the Department of Labor is neither necessary nor useful.

In 2015, the New York Times found in an investigation into the New York nail industry that the vast majority of workers in the industry were paid less than the minimum wage, and sometimes even no wages. Workers were severely exploited and had to endure various insults including video surveillance and corporal punishment. Most of these nail technicians were immigrants from China, South Korea, Nepal and South America, and they often worked overtime and for low wages. However, many workers in the New York nail industry, who did not have legal residency, could only swallow their anger and dared not report after being exploited by their employers.

In his book, American writer Brennan pointed out that the US immigration policy not only failed to improve the problem of human trafficking and the situation of vulnerable groups in society, but also aggravated social problems and allowed more hidden forms of forced labor to appear in American society. The US society's lack of help and relief for victims rescued from forced labor has led them to fall into a new forced labor trap in order to make a living, and live forever in a vicious cycle of slavery and oppression.

In June 2022, the U.S. Institute on Human Trafficking released the 2021 Federal Human Trafficking Report. The report shows that in 2021, the number of forced labor crimes in the United States increased by 22% compared with 2020. In 2021, among the human trafficking cases heard by federal courts across the United States, 162 victims were forced to work, accounting for 36% of all 449 victims of human trafficking, and 93% of the victims of forced labor were foreign citizens.

Fourth, the adverse impact of U.S. forced labor has spilled over to the international community

The adverse impact of U.S. and China's forced labor has spread, triggering serious transnational human trafficking, violations of human rights in other countries and other issues. The United States is a veritable underachiever in ratifying and implementing international labor conventions, which echoes the United States' long-standing poor record in forced labor and violations of labor rights.

(I) Forced labor in China breeds cross-border human trafficking

The United States is a source, transit, and destination country for victims of forced labor and slavery, and there is a serious situation of human trafficking in both legal and illegal industries. According to the US State Department, as many as 100,000 people are trafficked from abroad to the United States for forced labor each year. In the past five years, all 50 states and the District of Columbia have reported cases of forced labor and human trafficking. Statistics from the US "China Human Trafficking Hotline" show that the number of reported cases increased from more than 3,200 to about 11,500 from 2012 to 2019, showing a significant upward trend. In 2020, the hotline received 10,583 reports and 16,658 victims. Modern slavery, mainly forced labor, is widely prevalent in American hotels, restaurants, massage parlors, farms, construction, and domestic services. Most of the victims are vulnerable groups such as new immigrants, children, and women. The perpetrators often use physical and mental abuse, threats, and humiliation to control the victims.

In April 2021, the United Nations Human Rights Council's Special Rapporteur on the negative impact of unilateral coercive measures on human rights and the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention issued a joint statement pointing out that the United States coerced people from other countries to cooperate with the United States through threats of sanctions and other means, which constituted forced labor and violated the rights and interests of the relevant personnel. In his 2018 report, the Human Rights Council's Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of slavery pointed out that many tomato farms in the United States had committed forced labor, bonded labor, sexual violence and threats of deportation against female migrant workers.

The 2021 Report on Human Rights Violations in the United States pointed out that due to the tightening of US immigration policies and China's poor supervision, human trafficking and forced labor against immigrants have intensified. The report cited data from the US Department of Justice in November 2021, pointing out that in a human trafficking case, dozens of workers from Mexico and Central America were trafficked to farms in Georgia, the United States, and were illegally imprisoned and forced to work under harsh conditions. These victims of "modern slavery" were forced to dig onions with their bare hands under the surveillance of gunmen, and were only paid 20 cents for each bucket of onions. Among them, "at least two people died and one was sexually assaulted multiple times."

In addition to the harsh working conditions, harsh management, confiscation of documents, and restriction of freedom are standard features of these forced labor cases. In 2021, the Associated Press revealed that hundreds of Indian workers were lured to New Jersey to build a large Hindu temple. After getting off the plane, these workers had their passports taken away and were forced to work more than 87 hours a week. The local minimum wage in New Jersey is $12 per hour, while these Indian workers only earn $1.2 per hour. Reuters reported that Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company, the world's largest tire manufacturer, had been accused of many things, including withholding wages for foreign workers in Malaysia, illegally requiring foreign workers to work overtime, and refusing foreign workers to keep their passports. The report quoted the lawyer in the case as saying that some employees worked overtime for 229 hours a month, far exceeding the 104-hour limit stipulated by Malaysia.

The US law enforcement agencies have clearly not done enough to crack down on human trafficking, forced labor and other behaviors. The "2021 Human Trafficking Data Report" released by the US Department of Justice shows that in 2019, prosecutors investigated 2,091 suspects for human trafficking and forced labor, but only 837 were convicted. Chrissy Buckley, a scholar at the University of Denver, pointed out that "the reason why forced labor in the United States is difficult to eradicate is that on the one hand, it is profitable, and on the other hand, due to weak US legislation and inefficient law enforcement, the risk of perpetrators being prosecuted is very small."

(II) US companies have long implemented forced labor abroad

The Washington Post disclosed in 2019 that the cocoa raw materials used by well-known large American chocolate companies such as Mars and Hershey have mostly been picked by child laborers in West Africa for nearly 20 years. The number of child laborers engaged in cocoa bean picking is as high as 2 million, and each person is paid less than $1 per day. In 2020, British TV4 reported that coffee beans used by well-known American coffee companies such as Starbucks were picked by child laborers under the age of 13 in Guatemala. These child laborers work 8 hours a day and more than 40 hours a week. The youngest is only 8 years old, and their daily wages can sometimes only afford a cup of coffee.

V. The international community has been criticizing the forced labor in the United States

For a long time, the international community has been seriously concerned about the existence of forced labor in American society and called on the US government to seriously reflect on and deal with it.

The problem of employing child labor in the agricultural sector of the United States is a chronic disease and a hard injury in the United States' implementation of international labor conventions, especially core labor conventions, and is also the biggest concern of the International Labor Organization's standard supervision mechanism for the United States' compliance with the conventions. Since 2012, the International Labor Organization's Committee of Experts on the Application of Conventions and Recommendations (CEACR) has expressed concern for many years about the serious work-related injuries of a large number of child laborers under the age of 18 on farms in the United States. During the 103rd International Labor Conference in 2014, the Committee on the Application of International Labor Standards listed the case of the United States violating the "Worst Forms of Child Labor Convention, 1999" as one of the key country cases for review.

In the past decade, CEACR has also commented on the United States' implementation of the "1957 Convention on the Abolition of Forced Labor" and the "1936 Convention on the Liability of Shipowners for Sick and Injured Seamen", demanding that the US government change its inappropriate actions and earnestly fulfill its obligations under the conventions. CEACR pointed out in 2017 that the United States should pass federal legislation to ensure that there is no imbalance in the number of compulsory labor sentences among different races due to racial discrimination in the criminal justice process. The US government should introduce necessary measures at the federal level to reduce racial and ethnic inequality in the crimi

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