Section 301 - the accidental forced labour audit

Apr 22
4 min read

Sometimes the most consequential advances in human rights come from people who, maybe, weren't thinking specifically about human rights at all.

Donald Trump's decision to instruct the United States Trade Representative to launch Section 301 investigations across 60 economies — nominally to examine whether their failure to prohibit imports made with forced labour was unreasonable or discriminatory and burdened US commerce — was probably not motivated by concern for garment workers in Bangladesh or electronics assemblers in Shenzhen.

It was certainly motivated by a need to reconstruct a tariff architecture after the US Supreme Court struck down his earlier IEEPA-based tariffs in February 2026, and Section 301 offered the next available legal vehicle.

And yet.

What does the Section 301 forced labour investigation require?

Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974 gives the USTR authority to investigate and respond to foreign trade practices that are unreasonable or discriminatory and burden US commerce. The investigations launched in March 2026 focused specifically on whether 60 economies — collectively accounting for over 99% of US imports — had failed to impose and effectively enforce a prohibition on goods produced with forced labour.

By statute, the USTR investigation required two things that matter enormously for the longer-term story:

seek formal consultations with each government under investigation, and
open a public comment process.

The public comment docket — USTR-2026-0133 — invited any interested party to submit written analysis.

The forced labour compliance record no one planned

What has followed is extraordinary, and almost certainly unintended.

Governments, trade ministries, law firms, industry bodies, and civil society organisations around the world have scrambled to document — for the formal public record of a US trade proceeding:

the state of their forced labour legislation, their enforcement frameworks, and the gaps in each.

The UK Government was advised to act swiftly to defend the Modern Slavery Act 2015, while simultaneously having to acknowledge, as Crowell & Moring noted in their client alert, that the Act contains no import ban equivalent to the US Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act and that the USTR forced labour investigation might find it lacked enforcement teeth.

The EU, meanwhile, was in the unusual position of pointing to its own Forced Labour Regulation — adopted only in December 2024 — as evidence of good faith, while noting that implementation was still in progress.

In submission after submission, legal counsel from firms including Thompson Hine, Mayer Brown, Davis Wright Tremaine, Duane Morris, and PwC advised clients to audit their supply chains, evaluate the robustness of their forced labour compliance frameworks, and — critically — place that analysis formally before the USTR.

The process, as Crowell & Moring observed, amounted to a structured form of self-disclosure by the world's largest economies about where their forced labour protections were and were not adequate.

Section 301 submissions: a new baseline for supply chain due diligence litigators

The significance of this public record extends well beyond the tariff question it was designed to serve.

For workers' rights advocates, class action litigators, and NGOs seeking to hold corporations and governments to account for labour rights abuses, the USTR comment process has generated something that previously did not exist in a single, authoritative, publicly accessible form:

a documented, economy-by-economy assessment of the legislative frameworks and enforcement gaps,

and deficiencies in forced labour compliance across the world's major trading nations.

Legal argument that a particular jurisdiction's forced labour protections are inadequate — or that a company's supply chain due diligence was structurally insufficient — can now be anchored to submissions made by that jurisdiction's own government, and by the world's leading trade law firms, in response to a formal US regulatory process.

The submissions to docket USTR-2026-0133 will not expire when the tariff question is resolved. They will likely sit in the public record, available to any litigator with a client whose labour rights were violated.

The unintended leverage

This is not the first time that legislation introduced for commercial reasons has inadvertently advanced human rights. The US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act was passed in 1977 to protect American firms from being undercut by rivals who bribed foreign officials — not to advance governance in developing economies. It became one of the most powerful anti-corruption tools in international law. The mechanism matters less than the effect it produces.

The Section 301 forced labour framework being constructed here may not be applied consistently. It is also not a substitute for direct legislative protection, for worker rights frameworks, or for the kind of direct worker engagement that generates reliable, anonymous evidence of abuse at the point where it actually happens.

Moreover, whilst the law and its interpretation may become clearer as a result of this process, that still does not mean workers have easy access to remedy.

But as an instrument for forcing governments and their legal advisers to document — formally and publicly — exactly where their forced labour protections fall short, it may have done more in six weeks than a decade of diplomatic dialogue.

Ask The Workers

Regardless of what trade policy does or does not achieve, the most direct route to evidencing forced labour conditions remains asking the workers themselves.

The submissions to docket USTR-2026-0133 identify legislative frameworks; they do not tell us what is actually happening day-to-day in the workplace.

Continuous worker voice data can support your supply chain due diligence — and how anonymous, scalable worker feedback can turn legislative frameworks into actionable evidence.

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