Florida's Senators Introduce Forced Labor Disclosure Bill

Florida's two U.S. senators, Marco Rubio and Rick Scott, introduced a bill that would require publicly traded companies to report any transactions with Chinese companies on the entity list or that are designated as military-industrial complex companies, and report their sourcing and due diligence activities for supply chains if their imported products have been "directly linked to products utilizing forced labor from Xinjiang, China." The senators, both Republican, announced the bill April 29, and said they have four other Republican co-sponsors.

The new bill shares some similarities with the NY Fashion Act (see 2202170050), a New York-state disclosure bill that is less wide-ranging. The bill would also affect all publicly traded U.S.-headquartered companies with operations in China, as it requires those companies to disclose whether a Chinese Communist Party committee has a role at that location, and if so, a summary of the corporate decisions influenced by the CCP committee.

If the bill became law, any due diligence and sourcing information would have to be clear and convincing evidence that the goods were not made with forced labor, because the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act says that any nexus to Xinjiang imports is assumed to be tainted with forced labor.

"Far too many American corporations profit from slave labor in China," Rubio said in the press release announcing the bill. “It is already illegal for these companies to import goods made with slave labor into the United States, and in two months, they will be prohibited from importing any goods from Xinjiang unless they can prove there is no slave labor. These companies must be transparent with their shareholders by disclosing the risks associated with products linked to Xinjiang and with companies complicit in genocide and the use of slave labor."

Rubio previously said that he was concerned that CBP would not strictly enforce UFLPA (see 2203290043). "If we have an administration that decides to use that as leverage, and say, 'Well, let's not enforce it too strictly, because the corporate lobbyists are here banging at the door of the White House, and by the way, we don't want China to be upset at us, because we want to do a green new deal climate thing with them,' then I think we're going to have a problem," he said in that interview in late March. "It's my hope the spirit with which the White House was lobbying against my bill ... asking us to slow it down and not to pass this -- let's hope that spirit is not the spirit that infuses how this is enforced. Because if it is, then the law's not going to be very effective."