On July 24th, with global supply chains still absorbing the shocks of the conflict in Iran and the largest oil-supply disruption on record, the United States imposed tariffs on 60 economies, covering over 99% of United States imports, on the grounds that each has failed to ban goods made with forced labor. It is the first economy-wide tariff program ever anchored in human-rights rationale, adopted under Section 301 of the Trade Act after the Supreme Court struck down the administration’s original tariff authority. Whatever the program’s legal fate, the more consequential question is whether it can deliver on its stated purpose. On that measure, the new tariffs borrow the moral authority of targeted sanctions while abandoning the design features such as individualized evidence, targeted enforcement, and conditional relief that distinguish sanctions from broader trade restrictions. In doing so, they risk weakening the credibility of both.
The program came together in a matter of four months. Three weeks after the Supreme Court’s ruling in March, the United States Trade Representative (USTR) opened investigations into whether 60 trading partners had failed to ban imports of forced-labor goods. The answer arrived in June when the USTR discovered that all 60 had, and the latest tariffs arrived at the end of July. The majority of trading partners from this list now face a 12.5% tariff, the 17 partners credited with forced-labor import bans or reciprocal trade commitments pay 10%, and a handful of low-tariff economies such as the European Union and Japan get capped rates.
Two design choices reveal the program’s priorities. The duties apply to a country’s entire export economy, whether or not any given product has connection to forced labor. Second, the exemptions which include raw materials, pharmaceuticals, and semiconductor equipment, track what the United States cannot source domestically, rather than those presenting the greatest forced-labor risk. A third tell is more procedural: the implementing memorandum includes severability clauses ensuring that if a court strikes the tariff on one partner, the remainder of the program survives. Given the current administration’s ongoing legal disputes over its tariff authority, the provision suggests a program designed not only for trade policy but also for litigation resilience.
The United States already has a forced-labor enforcement architecture built around individualized evidence and targeted remedies. Section 307 of the Tariff Act of 1930 bars imports of goods made with forced labor; Customs and Border Protection enforces it through withhold-release orders against specific producers, on specific evidence, and lifts them when the producer demonstrates remediation, as palm-oil producers have done after overhauling recruitment practices. The Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act sharpens the same tool, presuming goods tied to Xinjiang are tainted unless importers prove otherwise and naming offending entities on a public list. Global Magnitsky sanctions reach individuals and entities responsible for the abuse, freezing them out of the United States’ financial system not supported by publicly articulated findings, with delisting available if conduct changes.
The three instruments share a common institutional logic: evidence determines who is targeted, what remedy is imposed, and what earns relief. Each targets identified actors for identified conduct, making enforcement both credible to allies and legible to the firms it seeks to change.
Set side by side, the instruments diverge across every material design feature. Sanctions concentrate pressure on identified actors linked to forced labor; tariffs impose costs across an exporting economy in the hope of influencing government behavior, wagering that a duty on everything a country sells will push it to legislate an import ban. Relief under the targeted sanctions tools follows documented remediation; the tariffs name no benchmarks for earning it. Finally, while sanctions tie the scope of enforcement to the facts of each designation, the tariff schedule does not clearly map onto USTR’s own findings. Countries with different legal frameworks and enforcement records often receive the same treatment, while subsequent tariff adjustments also reflect broader trade negotiations.
The strongest argument for the tariff approach is straightforward: firm-level enforcement cannot reach the governments that tolerate forced labor, and the 10% tier does not reward countries that have enacted import bans. If trade-scale pressure is the only lever governments respond to, blanket tariffs appear to be the logical escalation. Whether that lever produces labor reforms rather than trade concessions, however, remains an open empirical question, and nothing in the program’s design suggests an intention to measure that outcome.
The deeper risk here is contamination. If human-rights language can anchor tariffs whose rates, exemptions, and timing all track trade objectives, then every forced-labor action the United States takes becomes easier to dismiss as protectionism in disguise. Trading partners are already making that argument, and future targets of Magnitsky designations or Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) enforcement will likely borrow it. Those instruments derive their credibility from evidence that is difficult to dismiss. A program that deploys the same moral vocabulary without comparable evidentiary foundations risks diminishing the credibility of both.
Three design features would distinguish a genuine forced-labor policy from a trade policy justified in human-rights terms. It would condition tariff relief on published enforcement benchmarks, making clear what conduct must change to earn relief. It would support its conclusion with country-specific findings capable of withstanding the scrutiny applied to sanctions designations. Finally, its exemptions and rate changes would track labor evidence rather than import dependence or negotiating leverage.
Policymakers should press for all three and ensure that enforcement resources remain focused on tools with established records of enforcement such as withhold release orders, UFLPA Entity List designations, and Global Magnitsky sanctions, rather than being diverted toward administering a tariff schedule. Forced labor persists in global supply chains often because it is profitable while remaining largely undetected. The most effective enforcement tools have done so by raising the cost of specific abuses by specific actors. The greatest cost of the policy may not be the tariff itself, but the precedent that human-rights enforcement can be untethered from the evidentiary standards that give it legitimacy.
Recommended Readings
Browder (2015) Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man’s Fight for Justice
Fishman (2025) Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare
Irwin (2017) Clashing over Commerce: A History of US Trade Policy
LeBaron (2020) Combatting Modern Slavery: Why Labour Governance is Failing and What We Can Do About It,
Mulder (2022) The Economic Weapon: The Rise of Sanctions as a Tool of Modern War