Trump’s Latest Sham Tariffs

Donald Trump needs tariffs almost as much as he needs flattery. For him they function less as a trade tool and more as a cudgel that allows him to exercise his will against other countries. They also create a system under which domestic corporations need to curry favor with him to get exemptions for their specific products.

Given their importance to him, Trump is willing to do just about anything to preserve his tariff initiatives. That includes ignoring the powers of Congress and concocting far-fetched rationales to try to get around adverse Supreme Court rulings.

The latest concoction is the recent announcement that Trump is imposing a new set of tariffs on 60 countries because of their supposed failures to prevent the importation of goods produced with forced labor. These duties range from 10 to 12.5 percent.

Forced labor is a real problem, but Trump is hardly a credible champion of labor rights. One only has to look at his inconsistent posture toward China, widely viewed as the biggest culprit.

The report that the U.S. Trade Representative issued to justify the new tariffs contains very little in the way of real evidence. The fact that it lumps countries such as Australia and Canada together with China makes it all the more dubious.

Critics of Trump’s plan argue that the tariffs will make it more difficult for countries to work together to adopt stronger measures against forced labor. The U.S. has already been an obstacle to such efforts, given its refusal to ratify the International Labor Organization’s 2014 Protocol to the Forced Labor Convention of 1930.

There is also evidence that Trump’s tariff pretext may be undermining legitimate work being done to combat forced labor in some countries. Two NGOs in Chile, Libera and Ecoceanos, report that their staff members have received death threats and other forms of intimidation after the groups were blamed for the new U.S. tariff on Chilean goods.

In a published interview, the director of Ecoceanos, acknowledged that his organization did provide information to the U.S. Trade Representative regarding abusive conditions in Chilean agriculture and fish farming, but he said the group recommended against raising tariffs and instead sought help in getting the Chilean government to adopt stronger measures against forced labor.

Back in the U.S., the new Trump tariffs are not going unchallenged. A group of 25 states have filed a lawsuit in the U.S. Court of International Trade arguing that the measures are pretextual and are inconsistent with prior forced labor cases brought under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974 and the language of that statute.

The states’ complaint points out that the “USTR identifies no mechanism by which an economy could be released from the tariffs through strengthened forced-labor-import enforcement, sets no benchmarks to measure the effectiveness of a country’s import controls, and erects an effective floor of 10% even on countries that the USTR acknowledges are making efforts to combat forced-labor-imports, signaling that no level of remedial action would suffice to lift the tariffs under this Administration.”

It is widely expect that the tariffs will not survive judicial scrutiny, but until that happens they will bring harm both to economies around the world and to the real movement against forced labor.

web version: https://dirtdiggersdigest.org/archives/8157