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BEIJING, Aug. 9 (Xinhua) — America’s Practice of Forced Labor at Home and Abroad: Truth and Facts

Over the years, the United States has concocted the biggest lies of the century, such as the so-called “genocide” and “forced labor” in Xinjiang, to smear and contain China. It enacted and implemented the “Uighur Forced Labor Prevention Law”, denigrated Xinjiang’s human rights record, and undermined Xinjiang’s survival and development. In fact, the forced labor claim does not apply to Xinjiang at all. Rather, it is a chronic disease of the United States that dates back to the nation’s founding. It continues to spread today and is getting worse than ever.

This report describes the practice of forced labor in the United States at home and abroad from a historical and current perspective. The aim is to clarify the facts, expose the lies and help the world better understand what forced labor is and who does it. Let the truth shine through the darkness of lies.

I. There is a clear definition of forced labor in international law

Since 1930, a series of conventions, protocols and other documents have established clear definitions and standards for determining forced labor in international law.

◆ International Labor Organization (ILO) core standards on forced labor include: Forced Labor Convention, 1930 (No. 29, ratified by 179 member states by the end of 2021), Forced Labor Abolition Convention, 1957 (No. 105, which ratified by 176 Member States by the end of 2021) and the 2014 Protocol to the Forced Labor Convention, 1930 (ratified by 59 Member States by the end of 2021).

◆ According to the 1930 Forced Labor Convention, the term forced labor “means any work or service required of any person under threat of any punishment and for which said person has not volunteered.” In other words, “involuntary”, “threat of punishment” and “work or service” are the three key elements of forced labour.

◆ According to ILO statistics, the United States has ratified only 14 international labor conventions, one of the fewest among member states. It has ratified only two of the ten fundamental conventions, and the Convention on Forced Labor from 1930 has not yet been ratified.

◆ China has ratified 28 international labor conventions. The 1930 Convention on Forced Labor and the 1957 Convention on the Abolition of Forced Labor were ratified in April 2022. China faithfully fulfills its obligations under international conventions and truly protects the rights of workers and prohibits forced labor through legislation and policy formulation and implementation. Chinese law expressly prohibits forced labor. The criminal act of forced labor is defined in Article 244 of the Criminal Code. In Xinjiang, workers of all ethnic groups choose jobs of their own free will and enter into employment contracts with employers and receive pay and rights and interests in accordance with laws and regulations such as the Labor Law and the Labor Contract Law and the Equality, Voluntary Basis and consents. Governments at various levels in Xinjiang also provide necessary job skills training to workers who volunteer. Workers of all ethnic groups are free to choose where to work and what to do. They are never threatened with punishment or restricted in their personal freedom. There is no forced labor in Xinjiang.

II. Forced labor in the United States was born and grew with the founding of the state

The slave trade was the original sin of the United States. When the United States was founded, the blood and tears of millions of black slaves sold to the country helped create enormous wealth and complete the primitive accumulation of capital.

◆ For a country with only 246 years of history, slavery in the United States was legal for nearly one-third of its history. According to the Transatlantic Slave Trade Database, there were at least 36,000 “slave expeditions” in the history of the slave trade between 1514 and 1866. According to the German data company Statista, there were about 700,000 black slaves in the United States. 1790, while by 1860 the number exceeded 3.95 million, with fewer than 490,000 free African Americans nationwide.

◆ Black slaves, without adequate food or clothing, were forced to work in harsh conditions at the bottom of society. They were cruelly exploited and many were even tortured to death. Many black slaves were forced into the cotton industry. As the American writer Edward Baptist wrote in his book The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism, the whip drove slaves to devote all their physical strength and most of their energy to picking cotton, making the speed faster and faster. Under the brute force of slave owners, cotton production in the United States by 1860 reached 130 times the production of 1800. Behind the rapid increase in cotton production was the blood and tears of black slaves.

◆ Data show that the value of the labor American slave owners extract from black slaves is as much as $14 trillion at current prices. According to the Montpelier James Madison website, home of the fourth president of the United States, James Madison, the slave economy was once the main engine of the American economy. From tobacco farming in Virginia to shipbuilding in Rhode Island, slavery was essential to the American economy. In 1850, slaves made up 80 percent of American exports. Sven Beckert, a historian at Harvard University, said that the US and the West prospered through slavery, not democracy.

◆ In tracing the history of slavery in the United States, The Conversation, a nonprofit news organization, noted that “criminal slaves” and “property slaves” have coexisted since the late 18th century. In Virginia, the state with the most African-Americans in prison, inmates were declared “dead ghosts” and “slaves of the state.” It wasn’t until the early 20th century that states stopped hiring criminals to farmers and industrial and commercial operators as cheap labor for railroads, highways, and coal mines. In Georgia, the 1907 abolition of felon leasing caused an economic shock to industries ranging from brickmaking to mining, causing many businesses to fail.

◆ Archives show that by the end of the 1860s, hundreds of thousands of Chinese laborers were involved in the construction of railroads in the United States. Poor Chinese farmers boarded ships known as “floating hells” where they were crammed like sardines and floated out to sea for about two months before arriving in California to work as coolies. On these voyages, up to 64.21 percent of Chinese died due to inhumane treatment, typhoons, or infectious diseases. Those who survived became targets of racial discrimination and whipping by white overseers. Originally planned as a 14-year project, the railway took only seven years to build. According to some historians, the bones of Chinese workers could be found under every threshold on the railway.

III. The United States has a terrible record of forced labor

Over the years, the US government has deliberately shirked its responsibility to protect labor, resulting in “slave labor” among inmates in private prisons, the widespread use of child labor, and horrific forced labor in the agricultural sector, making America a country of “modern slavery”. .

1. Forced labor is widespread in American prisons

◆ The United States is a nation of prisons in every respect. According to a report by the Prison Policy Initiative, 2 million prisoners are held in 102 federal prisons, 1,566 state prisons, 2,850 local jails, 1,510 juvenile detention facilities, 186 immigration detention centers, and 82 Indian Country prisons and military prisons. and other facilities in the United States. With less than five percent of the world’s population, the United States holds a quarter of the world’s prison population, making it the country with the largest incarcerated population and the highest incarceration rate.

◆ The 13th Amendment to the US Constitution nominally protects citizens from forced labor, but excludes criminals. The US prison system abuses the 13th amendment to legalize forced labor among prisoners. There are many incarcerated workers in prisons at the federal and sub-national levels who maintain the prison system on a daily basis, including repairs, cooking, cleaning and laundry. Most of them are black or other people of color. Some prisoners are leased to public projects or employed by companies in construction, road maintenance, forestry and funeral services, in jobs that are considered dirty, difficult or high-risk. According to Reuters, Suniva, one of the largest solar panel manufacturers in the US, is using prison labor to keep costs down. A company executive admitted to working with the federal prison industry (UNICOR) to move production lines from Asia back to the US for a lucrative federal contract.

◆ According to a report by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), at least 30 US states use inmates as a source of manpower for disaster and other emergency operations, and at least 14 hire inmates to fight wildfires. Most of the incarcerated workers say they have never received any formal training on the job and often have to perform dangerous procedures in violation of safety protocols and without protective equipment. Victims, who are not rare, are often not recorded by prisons. The Atlantic commented in 2015 that “convict leasing was cheaper than slavery because farm owners and companies did not have to worry about the health of their workers.”

◆ The United States has effectively created a vast “prison-industrial complex.” Private prisons operated under government contracts have become a major source of forced labor in the United States. Prisoners in private prisons are completely at the mercy of their employers and have no right to refuse work. As many as 76 percent of inmates interviewed reported various punishments when they were unable or unwilling to work, including solitary confinement, reduced family visits, or denial of bail or commutation. In addition, inmates have no choice in their work assignments, which are based entirely on the arbitrary, discriminatory or even punitive decisions of the institution’s management. In her report Bloody Lucre: Carceral Labor and Prison Profit, Laura Appleman, a professor at Willamette University School of Law, points out that the private prison is a “harmful form of slavery” and that inmates are “trapped in endless labor” of ever-increasing profit, the literal income of physical labor , suffering and exploitation.”

◆ For years, private prisons in the United States colluded with greedy politicians to force inmates to work, turning private prisons into slavery “concentration camps” where they could get rich by exploiting the poor. Due to the lack of supervision, forced labor prisoners work long hours in harsh conditions while being paid little or in some cases nothing at all. In early 2022, the ACLU filed a lawsuit exposing the pervasive power-for-money trading of detention facilities in America’s private prisons that exacerbates over-incarceration and forced labor, and demanded that the US Marshals Service provide information on contract operators and publish it.

◆ US prisons spend less than one percent of their budget on paying incarcerated workers who produce more than $11 billion worth of goods and services each year. Large American corporations make heavy use of prison labor because prisoners have no work rights and are cheap. Private prisons under contract to the government make millions of dollars a year from forced prison labor. As of May 2022, the average hourly wage in the United States was about $10.96, while incarcerated workers were paid less than a dollar an hour. In addition, many prisons have not given inmates a raise in years or even decades. In seven states, including Florida, inmates are not paid at all for most of their work duties. In addition, prisons withhold many inmates’ wages for “taxes, room and board expenses, and court costs.” More than 70 percent of respondents said that they could not afford basic necessities while in prison.

◆ During the COVID-19 pandemic, at least 40 US states required inmates to make masks, hand sanitizer and other protective equipment, remove large amounts of medical waste from hospitals, move bodies, build coffins and dig graves. Prisoners who performed these high-risk tasks received almost no protection. Since the start of the pandemic, nearly one-third of incarcerated people in the U.S. have contracted COVID-19, and 3,000 have died due to inadequate medical care or poor conditions in detention. The Los Angeles Times revealed that during the pandemic, thousands of inmates in California were forced to make masks and furniture in high-risk conditions. The prison factories have been operating despite many confirmed cases of COVID. Prisoners had to sew thousands of masks a day without providing one themselves. Prison staff threatened to postpone the release date if the prisoners did not do the work.

2. Forced labor of women and children is appalling

◆ Child labor has long been a problem in the United States. America’s mines, tobacco farms, and textile factories began employing and exploiting children more than a century ago. To this day, the United States remains the only one of the 193 member states of the United Nations (UN) that has not ratified the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, and child labor remains an unresolved problem in the country. Statistics from the US Department of Health and Human Services and other institutions show that half of the 100,000 people trafficked into the United States for forced labor each year are minors.

◆ According to the nonprofit Association of Farmworker Opportunity Programs, there are still about 500,000 child farmworkers in the United States, many of whom started working at age eight and work up to 72 hours a week. These child farm workers are regularly exposed to dangerous chemicals such as pesticides. In addition, they are at greater risk of injury at work due to the need to operate sharp tools and heavy machinery without the necessary training and protective measures. According to the U.S. National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, between 1995 and 2002, approximately 907 youth deaths occurred on U.S. farms. The Washington Post reported that between 2003 and 2016, approximately 452 children died from workplace injuries in the United States, including 237 children. fatalities in agriculture. A November 2018 U.S. Government Accountability Office report shows that about 5.5 percent of child labor is in agriculture and accounts for more than 50 percent of all work-related child deaths. In several US states, tobacco farms employ large numbers of children to harvest and dry tobacco leaves, posing a significant risk to their physical and mental health. Many children were poisoned by nicotine, and some were even diagnosed with lung infections.

◆ According to official statistics, in 2019 alone, US police found 858 cases of child labor in violation of the Fair Labor Standards Act, and 544 minors were found working in hazardous locations. The American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations, the largest union federation in the United States, reported that the Department of Labor (DOL) reports an average of only 34 child labor violations annually, far below the actual number, revealing deficiencies in the DOL- this law enforcement agency.

◆ The Richmond Times-Dispatch reported that 240,000 to 325,000 women and children are sexually exploited in the United States each year. American NGO End Slavery Now says a child sold into the sex industry “works” 12 hours a day, seven days a week, and the perpetrators can profit from US$150,000 to US$200,000 each year.

3. Forced labor is widespread in many sectors in the United States

◆ An article published on the website of the University of Denver reveals that at least 500,000 people in the United States live in modern slavery and are victims of forced labor. Because of widespread forced labor, labor trafficking in the United States is particularly severe in 23 sectors, including domestic services, agriculture, tourism, hospitality, health care, and beauty services. In 2004, the Center for Human Rights at the University of California, Berkeley, after examining relevant cases from 1998 to 2003, pointed out that ten thousand or more people are working as forced labor in many cities across the country, forming an illegal trade. which is covert, inhumane, widespread and criminal.

◆ Existing US immigration laws breed modern slavery. The U.S. temporary visa system binds foreign workers to their employers by law, leaving them in a vulnerable position, as workers are afraid to leave their jobs for fear of deportation, even if the employer arbitrarily lowers their wages or increases their working hours. The asymmetry between employers and employees is systemic, and there is evidence linking forced labor in the United States to certain types of visas. A 2014 study by the Urban Institute and Northeastern University shows that more than 70 percent of forced labor victims surveyed entered the U.S. legally with a visa. Ending this form of modern slavery requires reforming US immigration laws. However, both Congress and the administration lack the will for such reform.

◆ Most sweatshops in the United States are based in major cities such as New York and Los Angeles. These shops usually make clothes, coffee and electronic products. The DOL has estimated that there are as many as 22,000 sweatshops in the country in the apparel industry alone. In order to reduce costs and increase profits, sweat shop owners exploit legal loopholes in various ways to avoid government regulation. Workers receive salaries and allowances far below the statutory limit and are not adequately compensated for long and overtime hours. In extreme cases, employers even abuse them. According to a DOL investigation report obtained by The New York Times, Vietnamese workers at a garment factory in American Samoa were routinely beaten by factory guards, and a worker lost her left eye after being beaten with a pipe by a guard. Indian workers in a food factory in Oklahoma were constantly given inadequate food. Many of the factory workers were severely malnourished and looked like “walking skeletons”.

◆ In the domestic service sector, the vast majority of service personnel are immigrants and are not recognized as employees by US law. According to US immigration policy, they are not allowed to freely change their clients or they will be deported. Most of the victims work in very poor conditions. They often cannot get paid on time and are paid below the minimum wage. Employers and their families are exposed to violence, sexual assault and intimidation, and are prohibited from complaining to anyone or face deportation. According to a 2014 report by the Urban Institute and Northeastern University, more than a third of victims of forced labor in the United States are domestic workers.

◆ In the agricultural sector, approximately 30 percent of farmworkers and their families live below the federal poverty line. They are subjected to threats, violence and forced labor and cannot express their wishes. The city of Immokalee in southwest Florida is known as the “town of tomatoes” in the United States. It has a population of about 26,000, most of whom are farmers from countries including Mexico, Guatemala and Haiti. The local minimum wage is $8.65 per hour. However, these farm workers are only paid $5.50 an hour, far below the minimum wage.

According to research by The Guardian, foreign workers on US corn farms are not protected by law. They live in extremely poor conditions and are only paid US$225 after working 12 hours a day for 15 days. They often become victims of sexual assault, harassment, wage theft and work-related injuries or even fatal workplace accidents, and are often exposed to dangerous chemicals.

In her 2017 report Forced Labor in the U.S., freelance journalist Gina-Marie Cheeseman found that on some U.S. farms, foreign workers are forced to sleep in shacks and trucks and asked to pick agricultural products without being paid. . Those who try to escape are beaten.

According to a report by the American Economic Policy Institute, seasonal agricultural workers in the United States are vulnerable to wage theft and other abuses because of their immigration status and fear of retaliation and deportation. Millions of dollars in back wages are reported each year. The DOL’s Wage and Hour Division is underfunded and understaffed to provide adequate protection and assistance to farmworkers. As a result, these workers feel that reporting employer violations to the DOL is neither necessary nor helpful.

◆ According to a 2015 New York Times survey of the nail industry in New York City, the vast majority of nail industry workers are paid below minimum wage, and sometimes not at all. These workers are severely exploited and subjected to various forms of humiliation, including constant video surveillance and physical punishment. Most of these workers are immigrants from China, Korea, Nepal and South America. They often work overtime with very low wages. Many New York nail industry workers who do not have legal residency status are often too scared to come forward, even though they are being taken advantage of by employees.

◆ Denise Brennan, an American writer, wrote in her book that the American immigration policy, instead of solving the problem of human trafficking and improving the position of vulnerable groups in society, exacerbated social problems and enabled the emergence of more hidden forms of forced labor. in American society. American society does not provide enough support and assistance to victims who have been freed from forced labor, causing them to voluntarily fall into new traps of forced labor just to earn a living, and forever haunted by a vicious cycle of enslavement and oppression.

◆ According to the 2021 Federal Trafficking in Persons Report released in June 2022 by the United States Institute on Trafficking in Persons, the number of criminal forced labor cases filed in 2021 increased by 22 percent from 2020. Of the 449 victims of human trafficking cases filed in US federal courts in 2021, 162 or 36 percent were victims of forced labor. And 93 percent of identified victims in forced labor cases were foreign nationals.

IV. The spillover effect of forced labor in the United States is felt around the world

The widespread negative impact of forced labor in the United States has resulted in serious transnational human trafficking and human rights violations in other countries. The United States lags behind in ratifying and implementing international labor conventions, matching its longstanding poor record of forced labor and labor rights violations.

1. Forced labor leads to transnational human trafficking

◆ The United States is the origin, transit center, and destination country for victims of forced labor and slavery. Both legal and illegal industries in the United States have serious problems with human trafficking. According to the US State Department, up to 100,000 people are trafficked into the US each year and become victims of forced labor. In the past five years, cases of forced labor and human trafficking have been reported in all 50 US states and Washington, D.C. According to statistics published by the National Human Trafficking Helpline, the number of reported cases increased significantly from more than 3,200 in 2012 to approximately 11,500 in 2019. In 2020, 10,583 cases were reported in which involved 16,658 victims.

Modern slavery, which involves forced labor, is often seen in America’s hotels, restaurants, massage parlors, farms, construction companies, and domestic services. The victims are mostly new immigrants, children, women and other vulnerable groups. Means such as physical and psychological abuse, threats and humiliation are often used to control victims.

◆ According to a joint statement issued in April 2021 by the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights on the Adverse Impact of Unilateral Coercive Measures on the Enjoyment of Human Rights and the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, the US government used threats to coerce foreign individuals into cooperating with it . apply sanctions that indicate the state of forced labor and violations of rights and interests. In her 2018 report, Urmila Bhoola, the United Nations special rapporteur for human rights on modern forms of slavery, highlighted that cases of forced labour, slave labour, sexual violence and threats of eviction against female migrant workers were found on several tomato farms in United States.

◆ As highlighted in the 2021 Report on Human Rights Violations in the United States, stricter US immigration policies combined with lax enforcement at home have exacerbated human smuggling and migrant labor trafficking. Citing an indictment released by the US Department of Justice in November 2021, the report reveals that dozens of workers from Mexico and Central American countries were smuggled to farms in the state of Georgia, where they were illegally imprisoned and forced to work in torturous conditions . . These victims of modern slavery had to dig onions with their bare hands at the threat of guns and violence for just 20 cents a bucket. At least two workers died, and one was sexually assaulted several times.

◆ In addition to difficult working conditions, cases of forced labor are also characterized by cruel treatment, confiscation of personal documents and restrictions on freedom. In 2021, the Associated Press reported that hundreds of Indian workers were lured to build a massive Hindu temple in New Jersey. Upon arrival, their passports were confiscated and they were forced to work more than 87 hours a week for $1.2 an hour, while New Jersey’s minimum wage was $12 an hour. Reuters reported that Goodyear, the US company and the world’s largest tire maker, has been sued repeatedly by foreign workers at its Malaysian factory over allegations of unpaid wages, illegal overtime and denial of full access to their own passports. According to the workers’ lawyer, some migrants worked 229 hours a month in overtime, far exceeding the Malaysian limit of 104 hours.

◆ U.S. law enforcement has apparently not done enough to crack down on human trafficking and forced labor. According to the 2021 Human Trafficking Data Collection Activities Report released by the U.S. Department of Justice, a total of 2,091 individuals were referred to U.S. prosecutors for human trafficking and forced labor offenses in 2019 but were convicted only 837. Chrissey Buckley, a researcher from the University of Denver, points out that forced labor remains in the US because it is a profitable business and because inadequate legislation and ineffective law enforcement reduce the risk of prosecution of criminals.

2. American companies have long practiced forced labor overseas

◆ In 2019, the Washington Post revealed that for nearly two decades, many American chocolate giants, including Mars and Hershey, used raw cocoa produced by child laborers in West Africa. More than two million workers in the cocoa industry are children, earning less than $1 a day. In 2020, Britain’s Channel 4 revealed that coffee beans used by Starbucks and other well-known American coffee companies were harvested by workers in Guatemala under the age of 13. These children worked eight hours a day, more than 40 hours a week, and the youngest was only eight years old. Their daily wage is sometimes only about the price of a cup of coffee.

Q. The international community has long criticized forced labor in the United States

The international community, which has long been seriously concerned about forced labor in the United States, calls on the US government to seriously consider and address the important issues.

◆ Child labor in the U.S. agricultural sector is an indelible stain on the U.S.’s track record in implementing international labor conventions (ICLs), especially core conventions. This is also the most important concern of the ILO’s standards monitoring mechanism regarding the implementation of the Conventions in the US. Since 2012, the Committee of Experts on the Application of Conventions and Recommendations (CEACR) has repeatedly expressed concern about fatal occupational injuries and accidents suffered by children under the age of 18 working on US farms. During the 103rd session of the International Labor Conference in 2014, the Committee on the Application of Standards (CAS) discussed in detail the US violations of the worst forms of child labor dating back to 1999.

◆ In addition, over the past decade, CEACR has commented on US compliance with the 1957 Forced Labor Abolition Convention and the 1936 Shipowners’ Liability (Sick and Injured Seamen) Convention and called on the US government to reverse its inadequate practices. and fulfills its obligations seriously. In 2017, the CEACR emphasized that the US government should adopt federal legislation to ensure that racial discrimination does not result in racial disparities in sentencing, including mandatory work in the criminal justice system, and should take the necessary steps at the federal level to reduce racial disparities. and ethnic disparities in the criminal justice system to ensure that a sentence that includes compulsory labor is not harsher for certain racial and ethnic groups.

◆ In 2016, after a visit to the United States, the UN Special Rapporteur on human trafficking, Maria Grazia Giammarinaro, called on the United States to make more effective efforts to detect human trafficking for forced labor and labor exploitation. The statement cites data from 2015 that 75 percent of human trafficking cases in the United States were related to sex work, 13 percent to labor trafficking, and 3 percent to both. Women and girls, migrant workers, unaccompanied and homeless children, people fleeing conflict, runaway youth, Native Americans, and LGBTI individuals are particularly vulnerable to trafficking and labor and sexual exploitation.

Ignoring its own enormous problems of forced labor and modern slavery past and present, the United States deliberately discredits other countries and spreads lies about “forced labor”. This reveals nothing but its hypocrisy and double standards regarding human rights and its modus operandi of using human rights as an excuse for political manipulation and economic intimidation.

The “Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act” promoted by the United States is not an act of concern and concern over alleged “forced labor” in Xinjiang. It aims to deprive the people of Xinjiang of their right to work by creating “forced unemployment”, destroy the livelihoods of all ethnic groups in Xinjiang by creating “forced poverty”, and disrupt the international economic and trade order as well as industrial and supply chains by creating “forced segregation “. What the United States is doing is basically violating human rights under the guise of human rights, defying the rules under the guise of rules, and breaking the law under the guise of law. Such attempts, which are against the trends of the time, are doomed to failure.

What the US government should do is stop posing as a “lecturer” on human rights, review its own flawed data on forced labor, stop spreading rumors and lies, stop meddling in China’s internal affairs, stop implementing “Uighur forced labor prevention works”. Take action” and stop “using Xinjiang to contain China”.

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