Don’t believe the Trump administration’s rationale for its new volley of tariffs against everybody.
The new levies, ostensibly to punish countries for failing to do enough to curb forced labor, switched on at 12.01am on Friday, to coincide with the expiration of a temporary 10% blanket duty that Donald Trump imposed in February, ostensibly to protect the United States from a balance-of-payments crisis.
That duty was imposed right after the supreme court struck down tariffs the president unleashed on US trading partners last year on the also spurious grounds that the US faced a variety of national emergencies.
The shifting justifications alone underscore how Trump’s arguments are bullshit. But the specific nature of the latest accusation truly takes the cake.
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The US is arguing that tariffs of 10% or 12.5% are justified against 60 trading partners because they import stuff made with forced labor, unfairly undercutting American producers. But the charge omits that forced labor is not only prevalent across the US. It is also actively enforced by the state.
Americans import lots of stuff made with forced labor: $170bn worth of imported goods are at risk of being tainted at some stage along the supply chain, according to the Global Slavery Index (GSI), from raw materials through to finished products. In 2023, this was the most among the countries in the G20.
It includes electronics imported from China and Malaysia; clothing from India, Vietnam and Bangladesh; fish from Ghana; and timber from Russia, Brazil and Peru. The mining of essential minerals used in many electronics the US buys from abroad, from cobalt and copper to lithium and nickel, is rife with allegations of human rights abuses.
To be sure, until recently the US was the only country that explicitly prohibited importing goods made with forced, convict or indentured labor. Still, the GSI reports no evidence that penalties are enforced against companies that fail to comply with reporting mandates, due diligence or other procurement regulations.
Then there’s the issue of forced labor at home. There were 1.1 million people living in modern slavery in the US on any given day in 2021, according to the GSI, mostly doing domestic work, or toiling in agriculture, construction, retail, hospitality and illicit activities.
That amounts to 3.3 forced workers for every thousand people in the population, which is more than in many of the countries Trump wants to punish. In the Netherlands and Germany, there are 0.6 forced workers per thousand people. In Britain there are 1.8.
Canada also has a law on the books prohibiting imports made with forced labor. The prevalence of slave labor in Canada is only 1.8 per thousand people. Still, it just got hit with a 10% tariff because according to the US trade representative it is not doing enough to enforce the law. (The European Union will ban imports that involve forced labor starting in 2027.)
But here is the real rub: a significant share of modern slavery in the US is enforced by the state.
The US stands out among the world’s democracies by allowing forced labor in prisons. And there is no legal obstacle to export goods made by prisoners forced to work against their will.
The 13th amendment to the constitution bans slavery and involuntary servitude, but it exempts work “as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted”. In Alabama prisons, they call the forced labor “mandatory chores”.
About 800,000 of the 1.2 million people in state and federal prisons work, according to a report in 2022 by the American Civil Liberties Union and the University of Chicago – often against their will, under the threat of further punishment. Incarcerated workers, the report adds, “are under the complete control of their employers, and they have been stripped of even the most minimal protections against labor exploitation and abuse”.
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Most work for the prisons themselves and other government businesses. In Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina and Texas, more than 10,000 prisoners are assigned to agricultural work on penal plantations or prison farms, according to the ACLU report. They are also often farmed out to the private sector. In Alabama, according to an investigation by the Associated Press, they were leased out to at least 500 private businesses between 2018 and mid-March 2024.
Prisoners toil in poultry processing plants and work in the kitchens of some of the biggest fast-food chains. They cook, wash dishes, fix plumbing and clean buildings. They are paid pennies an hour. And their wages are often garnished by the state.
In seven southern states – Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina and Texas – almost all work by prisoners remains unpaid.
If he is so inclined, Trump could help the fight against slave labor by taking a hard line against the US’s southern states, which generally raise less tax revenue and thus rely more on “free” work by the incarcerated to both operate prisons and generate revenue for the public sector.
The ACLU report estimated that the incarcerated produce stuff worth more than $2bn a year and provide $9bn worth of services to their prisons.
Other countries could help by slapping some tariffs on American goods to retaliate against these blatantly unfair practices.
