Congress called senior Department of Labor officials to testify before it this week, in order to validate audits investigating slavery and other forced labor conditions in China. The officials testified that it would be impossible to determine the legitimacy of any such reports.
The officials in question were called to testify before the CECC (Congressional-Executive Commission on China), an entity drawing from both Congressional chambers focused largely on the human rights abuses perpetrated by the Chinese Communist Party, as other malign practices. During the Tuesday hearing, “Factories and Fraud in the PRC,” the commission sought to determine whether it is possible for companies based in America and the rest of the free world to realistically conduct due dilligance to determine whether the parts of their supply chains based in China are devoid of human rights abuses.
The consensus arising from the experts who testified was that social responsibility audits conducted by third parties were not reliable in the least, since the Communist Party in China has so infiltrated and subverted civil society that workers dare not speak freely about the conditions they face in industrial parks and factories. They also said that there is mounting evidence that China has been laundering products of slave labor by funneling them through shell companies in other countries, such as Vietnam and India, which interferes with efforts to track products and audit supply chains for products sold in the European and American markets.
The experts in the hearing focused on “slave labor” defined broadly as “employment environments from which escape is impossible.” Sometimes this looks like traditional slavery, where the worker has no rights or meaningful salary, and sometimes it looks more like sweat-shop employment in environments analogous to the old industrial era company towns that cropped up across America in the last nineteenth century. This latter sort of slavery is consistent with the current United Nations definition of the term, which classifies all forced labor as “modern slavery.”
Video from the hearing is available on YouTube.
