The Trump administration announced new tariffs targeting 60 trading partners — including the United Kingdom, Canada, and Brazil — citing forced labour concerns as the legal and moral justification. The BBC reported the announcement as sweeping tariffs over forced labour concerns, while Al Jazeera noted that US officials cited forced labour as the grounds for the new measures. Brazilian President Lula responded by saying his country could not “accept treatment” from Washington in this vein, framing the tariffs as politically motivated. The list’s breadth — spanning democratic allies with strong labour laws alongside authoritarian states with genuine forced labour practices — has generated significant scepticism about whether the human rights justification is the operative rationale.
The received wisdom
Critics across the political spectrum, though for different reasons, have objected to the framing. Left-of-centre trade analysts note that the United Kingdom and Canada have robust labour regulations, independent trade union movements, and no documented national-level forced labour practices in their export sectors — making their inclusion in the same category as, say, state-directed supply chains in authoritarian economies not merely inaccurate but dishonest. Progressive human rights advocates are also wary: they argue that genuine forced labour concerns risk being instrumentalised as cover for straightforward protectionism, which will make the already difficult work of building international coalitions against actual forced labour practices — in Xinjiang, in Gulf kafala systems, in certain Amazonian extractive industries — harder, not easier. The right-of-centre free trade wing, increasingly isolated within Republican ranks, objects on economic grounds: broad input tariffs will raise costs for American manufacturers who depend on imported components, and the “forced labour” justification provides no exemption mechanism for demonstrably compliant suppliers.
A different read
Let us concede the good-faith version of the Trump administration’s position before engaging with its problems. Forced labour is a real and seriously underaddressed issue in global supply chains. The Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, passed with overwhelming bipartisan support, established the principle that goods produced under conditions of state-coerced labour should not freely enter American markets. There is a genuine moral and economic argument that the world’s largest consumer market exercising its purchasing power to impose standards on upstream labour practices is one of the more effective instruments available short of direct political confrontation with authoritarian governments. When the US government has tried to address forced labour through diplomatic channels alone, the results have been notably weak.
The problem is not the principle. The problem is the list. Including Canada and the United Kingdom — countries with independent trade unions, ILO membership in good standing, and no documented national forced labour practices in the relevant export sectors — alongside countries with genuine state-directed coerced labour destroys the credibility of the entire exercise. When the same legal and moral instrument is used against an ally that meets every reasonable standard of labour protection and an authoritarian state that systematically uses prison labour in its export manufacturing, the instrument ceases to function as a human rights tool. It becomes a tariff with better-looking paperwork.
The historical parallel worth noting here is the use of “national security” as a tariff justification under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act. When the Trump administration first invoked Section 232 to impose steel and aluminium tariffs on Canada and the European Union in 2018, it generated exactly the same response: incredulity that America’s closest military allies were being designated national security threats. The administration’s legal position prevailed in the short term; the strategic damage to alliance cohesion was real and lasting. The forced labour tariffs carry the same structural problem. The justification may be defensible in a narrow legal sense while being strategically counterproductive in ways that outlast any particular administration’s trade negotiating cycle.
Lula’s reaction is worth taking seriously not because Brazil’s record on labour rights in Amazonian extraction is unblemished — it is not — but because the optics of a US administration simultaneously proposing forced labour tariffs on Brazil while running a trade surplus with the country, as reported in yesterday’s coverage, will resonate across Latin America as evidence that the moral justification is post-hoc rationalisation. That perception, right or wrong, matters for the US’s ability to build the very coalitions it needs to address genuine forced labour at scale.
The most constructive path forward would involve a differentiated instrument: genuine forced labour determinations made by an independent administrative body, with clear evidentiary standards, sector-by-sector exemptions for demonstrably compliant supply chains, and a sunset mechanism tied to verified remediation. What has been announced appears to be none of those things. It looks like a political instrument that borrows moral authority without bearing the costs of actually exercising that authority rigorously.
What to watch
Watch whether any of the 60 targeted countries initiate WTO dispute proceedings specifically challenging the forced labour justification — if multiple democratic allies do so simultaneously, it will create a legal and diplomatic burden for the administration that will need to be managed. Watch the UK’s response specifically: a government already managing the post-Brexit trade relationship with Washington will face domestic political pressure to push back, and how Starmer handles it will tell us something about whether the UK-US special relationship has a floor. Watch whether the tariffs generate any congressional pushback on the forced labour framing specifically, as distinct from war-powers-style checks — the two debates together would suggest Congress is beginning to develop a more systematic response to executive trade authority.
— J