Thread: New US law may vex exporters Ban on goods made via forced labour

A newly enforced US law could become another barrier blocking Thai exports unless shippers adjust to qualify under the rule's stricter labour standard, say industrialists. US President Barack Obama endorsed the Trade Facilitation and Trade Enforcement Act earlier this year, bringing it into force.

The law is a broad update of a US trade law that will allow a ban on any imported good produced by convicts or forced or indentured labour, said Vallop Vitanakorn, vice-chairman of the Federation of Thai Industries.

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New US law may vex exporters | Bangkok Post: business

Now lets have a little look at how the US would go complying with their own law.

In 1979, Congress created the Prison Industry Enhancement Certification Program (known as PIE; pdf) to establish employment opportunities for inmates "that approximate private sector work opportunities". On the surface, the program is a great idea. It gives prisoners something to do, allows them to contribute to their own upkeep and, hopefully, gives them a better shot of getting an actual living wage job upon release. Such was the intention, anyway.

Unfortunately, and perhaps unsurprisingly, this is not how the PIE program has worked out. Instead, it has become little more than a tidy profit-making scheme for corporations and other entities willing to exploit the captive labor force – often at the expense of private sector jobs.
The worst abuses of the PIE program occur in the agricultural sector, particularly in states where draconian immigration laws have led to labor shortages that have left crops rotting in fields. Rather than have to pay real-world wages, farmers turned to lawmakers to help, who, in turn, were only too happy to offer up their prisoners as a cheap alternative.


In Arizona, for instance, a state law requires that all able-bodied inmates must work. Prisoners who do jobs within the institution can expect to be paid between 10 cents and 50 cents an hour, but those lucky enough to get a job working for one of Arizona's Department of Corrections (ADC)'s private partners can expect to be paid a whopping fee of "more than 50 cents an hour".
Not exactly what you would call an "employment opportunity that approximates private sector work opportunities". And the prisoners assigned these jobs do not count themselves as lucky.
In a recent expose by Truthout, a female prisoner at Arizona's state prison Perryville unit described her day working as a laborer for a private company called Martori Farms.

"They wake us up between 2.30 and 3am and kick us out of our housing unit by 3.30am. We get fed at 4am. Our work supervisors show up between 5am and 8am. Then it's an hour to a one-and-a-half-hour drive to the job site. Then we work eight hours, regardless of conditions … We work in the fields hoeing weeds and thinning plants …
"Currently, we are forced to work in the blazing sun for eight hours. We run out of water several times a day. We ran out of sunscreen several times a week. They don't check medical backgrounds or ages before they pull women for these jobs. Many of us cannot do it! If we stop working and sit on the bus or even just take an unauthorized break, we get a major ticket which takes away our 'good time'.

Not very well it would seem, do as we say not as we do. More hypocrisy ?

More @
https://www.theguardian.com/commenti...payers-expense

I've often wondered how many of our cheap products made in China are actually made in gulags.

After factoring the markup by our local distributors, it seems that some products are being sold by China for not much more than the cost of raw materials.

This new law may cause friction between China and the USA.