Ep. 15 - The State of Forced Labor Import Enforcement in 2025

Justin Dillon: Welcome to the responsible supply chain show where we explore the world of responsible sourcing and resilient supply chains. I'm your host, Justin Dillon. And in each episode, we dive into stories from some of the world's best business, government, and thought leaders protecting people, planet, and products. Let's go. Episode 15.

Hey. If you were sitting by your computer waiting and waiting and waiting all August long, we're so sorry we weren't around. We, like all of Europe, and I don't live in Europe, but I, you know, I aspire to. We took August off. I think it was a good idea.

We are back, episode 15. Today we're talking to Doctor. Laura Murphy about the state of play around the import bans of goods made with forced labor. So yeah, we're gonna keep it super light today. It's September.

And you know what? I'm feeling hopeful. Okay? There, I said it. I know hope isn't built entirely on data, and I also know that hope without any data is just a delusion.

So I'm gonna give you some of my data around why I'm feeling hopeful. The hope that I'm feeling has nothing to do with responsible supply chains. But I just kind of feel like it's a good thing to open up with hope. Yeah. A few weeks ago, another dad and I chaperoned a battery of teenagers to a Zach Bryan concert in Golden Gate Park.

You know, to my chagrin, these teenagers didn't really want me there. But it was kinda like, we kinda needed to be there. You know, I wasn't quite sure about San Francisco yet. It's still, I couldn't quite tell. And so it's just one of those like, yeah, we need, we don't need you here, but you need to be here kind of things.

This is a big, big, big concert in Golden Gate Park. So everyone had to take public transportation, which San Francisco is not known for. So first data point around hope. San Francisco. I've lived near San Francisco.

I've worked in San Francisco. I just gotta say San Francisco's back. And I don't live in San Francisco. And since I moved my offices out of San Francisco, I haven't really needed to be there much. I don't have a lot of meetings there as much as I used to.

And ever since the pandemic, it just became like the set of a zombie apocalypse film. I mean, it has just been so, so, so bad, and so slow to reanimate, like really, really slow. But man, with new leadership in there, and of course, a lot of very, very excited young people coming for that artificial intelligence gold rush that's going on. Man, San Francisco is back and better than ever. And there's nothing better than seeing a city alive, especially when you've spent so much time.

So that gives me a little hope, because we weren't sure. I mean, we were hearing like San Francisco's dead, of course nobody believes it, you kind of go, Is it? The second sign of hope was actually from the concert. Now, I do know a thing or two about music. And given the music industry was technically my first job.

When I left the music industry, the record labels were all crying that the sky was falling because streaming was starting to take off, their business models of selling MP3s in the Apple Store or Amazon, their business model was in peril, which it was. And we all know that streaming won, and music, frankly, has never been better. But what's so amazing about living and kind of this era of music where it is predominantly all about streaming is that artists like Zach Bryant can perform a song on his iPhone in 2019 and then play to 55,000 young people in 2025, and a few older people, we just haven't been here before. Like that ability to bring something that is like clearly, he's an amazing artist. Like there's always been amazing artists, but he's amazing.

But just the pathway of kind of like the open source and the ability to like have talent and then find an audience that quickly. If he'd come out in 02/2008, it probably would've been a different story. And I'm a big fan of story. My favorite stories ones of redemption, and I love it when things when good things and good people win. Zach is one of those.

Also, our guest today how was that for a segue? Our guest today, is a good person and a good person who I believe is winning the good fight. Doctor Laura t Murphy is a senior associate in the Human Rights Initiative at the Center for Strategic International Studies. She was an adviser to the undersecretary for policy in the Department of Homeland Security during the Biden administration and at DHS with a primary focus, and you're gonna hear more about this, on the Uighur Forced Labor Prevention Act. She is a professor of human rights and contemporary slavery at the Helena Kennedy Center for International Justice at Sheffield Hallam University.

She's here to talk about how trade bans on goods made with forced labor like the UFLPA and how companies should be thinking about supply chain risk management. So please enjoy my conversation with doctor Laura Murphy. Laura, good to see you. I haven't seen you in a long time. How are you?

Laura Murphy: Oh, I'm doing well. I mean, as well as can be expected these days. That's a lot How of

Justin Dillon: about where are you?

Laura Murphy: Right this very minute. I am in New Orleans, which is where I'm from. I taught at Loyola University of New Orleans for ten years. So this is my, and I also grew up down here. So this is my home base.

Justin Dillon: I meet a lot of folks from New Orleans. That is a We

Laura Murphy: try to

Justin Dillon: keep What's people it like living in New Orleans?

Laura Murphy: It's perfect, Bliss, it's great. Love New Orleans. Yeah, growing up, I really thought that I wanted to leave desperately. I felt like there wasn't enough of an intellectual vibe here and that if you wanted to be educated, you need to get out of here. Like I sort of had inherited, adopted the outsider's view of what the South is like.

So I ran away as fast as I could and then long to come back all the time. So when I got a job at Loyola, was psyched. So I came back here 2010, I guess.

Justin Dillon: Well, you've done a lot on your sojourning around the world. We're going to talk quite a bit about that. You're mostly known on the Internet around UFLPA enforcement, the evolution of it. A big part of it, I know you're gonna talk we're gonna talk quite a bit about it today. I just for our listeners, I'm just wondering if you can explain for our audience what the UFLPA is and why it's so important for US importers to understand.

Laura Murphy: Sure. Yeah. So the UFLPA is the Uighur Forced Labor Prevention Act. It was passed by Congress in December 2021, went into effect in June 2022. And essentially it responds to a major crisis in China, and that is that there is a genocide going on there and a sort of the epicenter of that genocide at this point.

Previously there were hundreds of interment camps. A lot of those interment camps have closed. A million people were in it at their height. 600,000 people have been moved to mass arbitrary detention in prisons now. But the epicenter of that genocide, the work to separate families, to end people's culture, to forcibly transport people is in factories and farms.

It's in a system of forced labor implemented by the state. It's created by the state. It's enforced by the state. People get visited by the government. They knock on their door and they say we'd like you or your daughter, your teenage daughter to go work in a factory somewhere.

And you don't really have a choice because it's all operating on the backdrop of this system of mass arbitrary detention. And so Congress said this is a situation that that is beyond the pale. It is systematic and it's across the entire region. It's something that we can't really address because we can't go in and really work with workers there and try to change the system because it's imposed by the state. And so what do we do about it?

How do we address it? Well, we refuse to import those goods. And so recognizing the situation as being as grievous as it is, Congress then said, we're gonna we're gonna ban the import of any goods made in that region at all. And they were right to do so. The situation of forced labor in the Uighur region is pervasive.

It is inescapable. It's unauditable. You can't go down there and try to work with a single factory to try to change it. It's a remediable at this point. And so, so the US government protects consumers and businesses from buying the goods made in Xinjiang by banning the import of them.

And so since June 2022, goods that are made in whole or in part in the Uighur region of China, are, stopped or detained by CBP. If CBP detects that the product is made in whole or in part in Xinjiang in the Uighur region, then they stop it and the company has to prove to the government that that product was not made in Xinjiang or that it was not made with forced labor. Those are their two choices. Or they can re export that good and sell that good that's suspected of being made with forced labor to someone else in some other country. And so that kind of ensured there are lots of little pieces and parts, but the basic premise is that the US government assumes, presumes, that if a product was made in Xinjiang, it was made with forced labor.

Justin Dillon: What an interesting time. So this was this got past three three or went into got past a little bit longer, but started being implemented a few years ago. I remember years ago, doing some work with the Obama administration, around consumer, consumer awareness, around forced labor and supply chains, with a project to do with them called Slavery Footprint. And that caught so many consumers' attention, it kinda it kinda caught a moment of awareness that the administration said, hey, the president wants to do an executive order, something, you know, something meaningful, and and what do you think about, you know, doing fixing a a a loophole in a nineteen thirties tariff act? I'm like, that sounds like a nothing burger.

Why? Why? I don't even understand what a tariff act is. Mean, we all understand tariff acts now, don't we? That was the Smoot Hawley tariff act that in that act, we should be talking about that time and this time today, because there's just some real interesting parallels of what's going on, But, you know, this was twelve years ago or something like that.

It just, you know, no one was thinking about tariffs or import bans, but there was a loophole in that act that allowed for the importation of slave made goods if it couldn't be produced domestically. A weird loophole.

Laura Murphy: Right. We had any any any excuse. If it just we couldn't make enough of it. If we if we kind of wanted it a little bit, you know, like, then you could go ahead and bring it in. And so basically nothing stopped, right?

Because we for a hundred years, The United States has had a law that banned the import of forced labor made goods. A hundred years, it's just five shot, right? So since 1930, we're the only country to have that law. Really surprising to me. And so but but we never really enforced it until 02/2016.

Until that thing where we said, well, but if we kinda want it, we're gonna go ahead and bring in these sleeping The pigments

Justin Dillon: fact that it was there at all. I sometimes it's easier to say the sky is falling and stuff like, that's noble and good and beautiful and noteworthy. And sure, there was a loophole, but, like, people were thinking about these things a hundred years ago

Laura Murphy: Yeah.

Justin Dillon: At some level. And now we're thinking about them again, and it was the closing of that loophole that allowed for the, you know, for the UFLPA to come about. So there's a lot to celebrate in you know, we're we're we're having we're Americans. We have an international audience, and every know America's making a lot of news right now when it comes to tariffs and all that. But like, in the midst of all the chaos, there's things like that to celebrate, it allowed for this act to be created, which has really stirred up trade.

So maybe can you talk about how the UFLPA since it's been passed, how it's been enforced, and kind of what impact that's had on business?

Laura Murphy: So I have a piece coming out in the next sometime in the next week. I'm not exactly sure when, but a piece on what I think the impact of the UFLPA is. And I think it's enormous. Honestly, I'm biased. I've had a great, you know, role in advocating for the UFLPA and working with Department of Homeland Security, which I'm sure we'll talk about in implementing the UFLPA.

And so I admit that I'm a little bit biased, but I'm also obsessed in a way that almost no one else is about whether it's working, what it's doing, who's doing it now, like who's complying, who's not complying. So I am I'm in a position, I think, an unusual position, not necessarily unique, but an unusually nerding out obsessed position to assess how it's going. And I'll say that just right off the top, we should be doing better. The UFLPA has enormous powers attached to it, and we are able, By law, we have the authority to stop. Tons more goods that are made with forced labor and we should be.

However, that said, I think we've done a lot in three years. I think we've first of all, now that I've worked in government, realized just how hard it is to stand up office to and to train officers like customs officers to really figure out how to detect forced labor, to figure out how to stop things. What are the protocols? What are the what are the? What's the paperwork look like?

What like? What do you want to receive from a company when you stop their goods? Do you really want to see everything in their entire supply chain? I like when they first said we want to see everything for every supply chain. I said you're mad like where are you gonna like, where are you gonna have the computer center to hold all this data?

You know? Like, this is this is, this is significant what you're asked for. So so, like, just figuring out how to train people. Forced labor, you can't sniff it like you can sniff drugs. Right?

You can't

Justin Dillon: There's no emission.

Laura Murphy: Right? There's there's no X-ray technology to see, oh, is this, you know, is this product made with forced labor or not? So, like, training people to really trade supply chains, be able to identify when companies are are telling you the truth about what's in their supply chain and when they're not telling you the truth about what's in their supply chain, about what paperwork they need to be able to prove it. All these things take time and I want things to happen overnight, right? And in government time, this thing did happen overnight.

You know what? What CBP did? What Customs and Border Protection did to be able to equip themselves to identify forced labor made goods from the Uighur region in imports coming into The United States was they took the experts they already had. They said, look, we have people who are working on counterfeits who know apparel supply chains. Counterfeits who know drug supply chains, pharmaceutical supply chains.

We have people who are working on tariffs and dumping, who know metals and automotive supply chains and these kinds of things. And so let's get them to figure out what do they know that could be applied to, you know, if you put on your UFLPA glasses, how do you see, these violations in the imports that come in? And so they leaned on that, but they also built up new technology. They're opening new isotopic testing labs. They're, you know, they've they've hired a lot of new people to work on the UFLPA entity list, which was the office I worked in, where they find the worst of the worst, the companies that are are are absolutely using forced labor or sourcing from the Uighur region, they put them on this list where they individually, those companies are not allowed to import in or, you know, or their goods are not allowed to be imported in if they're made in whole or in part by those companies even.

And so, so it was a lot of work. And they're, they're growing, they're developing all the time, right? It didn't happen. It didn't happen overnight. It happened overnight in government time in some ways, but they put the resources, they put the political will behind making it happen, and and it works.

CBP has stopped. I it's like $3,700,000,000 worth of goods as of right now. They've stopped goods. Know?

Justin Dillon: Rush roughly 16,000 shipments.

Laura Murphy: Yeah. Yesterday I looked up, it said 16,755, I think. Something like You said

Justin Dillon: you're passionate.

Laura Murphy: So Yes, I am. And I just I just happened to look it up yesterday. But it's it's, you know, it's a lot of shipments. It's not enough. There there are, you know, a 144 companies on this entity list.

There could be thousands.

Justin Dillon: Talk about that. Let's talk about that because I don't think you know, I I meet companies every day who know what the UFLPA is roughly. Mhmm. But they don't really know how the mechanisms work. And I'd like to start with what are the you know, how does a company end up on this list?

And how does and maybe we can talk about why. Not just how, but why. Why and how does a company end up on this entity list that you can't purchase from, correct, anywhere in the supply chain? Right. And then how do how do we get some of these products?

I think we had this week or last week, new products were added, like lithium and caustic soda. I don't don't drink soda, so I don't really know what caustic soda is. I probably shouldn't drink that soda either.

Laura Murphy: You don't drink caustic soda. Okay. So so

Justin Dillon: but, yeah, maybe you can talk about how these random items fall into this list.

Laura Murphy: Let's start with the entity list and then we'll talk about the high priority sectors. The entity list gives the US government's Forced Labor Enforcement Task Force. They call it the FLETIF. There's an abbreviation for everything, right? So the Forced Labor Enforcement Task Force has the authority to name individual companies to this entity list that they think that they have reason to believe, they have evidence to show is that are either using forced labor, transferring people from Xinjiang to factories, or essentially sourcing the goods from Xinjiang to export.

And so what happens is, know, there's a ton of civil society and academic research, including the stuff that I do as a researcher, that informs the government about companies that relevant might to that list and that are using either Uighur forced labor or buying Uighur forced labor made goods. And then they do their own research. The US government does their own research to figure out does it meet the statutory requirements? Is this a company that we believe and that an army of lawyers, I mean, literally 30 lawyers look over every one of these things and says that each one of them comes in and says, we need more evidence like this. We need you to state this.

This is an inference. Can you give us evidence for that? And they really go through it very rigorously. Then seven separate agencies vote whether they want to add a company to the list. Seven agencies.

And right? So this is So there's no entity, no company that's added to that list that doesn't undergo an extreme amount of scrutiny.

Justin Dillon: We all complain about government all the time, but this is something that government can do. That can really improve the state of the world, that is very practical in using market forces as in to do something that governments can't do outside of their own jurisdiction. I think it's very powerful. No one and a lot of people don't like it. Help me understand if I'm not directly buying from this banned entity that's on this list, how am I responsible if there's somewhere in the supply chain?

Explain the responsibility part of it. Because I think there's some confusion of like, well, we looked at our, you know, our invoices and we didn't see any of those names, so we're good. And I hear that a lot.

Laura Murphy: Right. I think that for a long time, companies have been able to have extremely opaque supply chains and have benefited from that. They didn't have to look at what was happening at the far end of their supply chains. Their first tier suppliers almost certainly are not using forced labor. There are some first tier suppliers that are, but you know, some their their end manufacturers are probably not the ones using forced labor, but way down the supply chain in the mines and the factories, you know, the textile factories and the farms.

There's a lot more forced labor, and we all know that. But for decades now, companies have been able to expand their international network of suppliers Without having any acknowledgment of what happens at the farthest ends of it, and so. So what the UFLP has done and to some extent, you know the tariff act, you know, enforcement since 2016, it's made companies realize that they need to know their supply chains better, that the first tier is not enough. And that the US government and increasingly other governments are going to hold them accountable for what happens down their supply chains. And they're not going to be able to sell to consumers goods that are made with forced labor and just turn a blind eye to it anymore.

That's not allowable anymore.

Justin Dillon: You know, when we hear the word genocide, that's an electric word. I love that, I don't know if Stalin actually, there's not a lot of Stalin quotes I'm excited about, but the quote about the death of a million is a statistic and the death of one is a tragedy. We don't emotionally act on statistics. Something triggers inside of us when we hear a story. So we hear genocide, it's like, Oh, that sounds terrible.

How can that be happening today? Explain a little bit more about what we're talking about in the lives of the people who are being affected here, because most people in America will never meet a Uighur.

Laura Murphy: Ten years ago, if I talked about, you know, having lived in the Uighur region, lived in Xinjiang, talk about Uighur life, Uighur culture, Uighur history, people would just students, you know, shake their head. Regular people on the streets would say, is that? I don't know what you're talking about. And now, sadly, because of this horrific situation, people do know about the Uighur people. They know more about Uighur culture.

They may be eating Uighur food if they live in a big city. They know China's repression of the Uighurs. And you're right that the word genocide is a tough one. It's a complicated one because I think we have a sort of colloquial idea that genocide requires mass extermination. Right?

But even in Germany, that mass extermination only happened in the last few years of the genocide that happened during the Holocaust. And the definition of the like legal definition, the international human rights definition of genocide doesn't require that like physical extermination of a people. It can be the intent to destroy people in whole or in part, a people in whole or in part. And that destruction can happen by erasing their lives, their livelihoods, their culture. And this is where forced labor is really interesting, like as an epicenter, as I said, an epicenter for what's going on there.

What they're doing is they're, like I said, going door to door to people and saying every single person in this house who is able to work must be working and the state gets to decide where and how you work. And so if you're like, I've got this farm, the government says that's cool. We're going to take over your farm anyway, because we want to make mass large scale farms out of this. We want to make corporate farms out of out of this land. We don't want small scale farms.

We don't want subsistence farmers. We don't want you to be. We don't want you to be a farmer period. We want you to be working in a factory. So don't worry, we've got your farm, got it taken care of, no worries.

And then they say, and there are examples where like this story plays out just like this. Well, the thing is we've got kids and, you know, we don't want to go to some distant place or even someplace like only a, you know, a few miles away because I want to stay home and raise my kids. Don't worry. We got you. We've built all these boarding schools, put a million kids.

There are only 12,000,000 Uighur people in in in China. A million kids are in in boarding schools right now. It is mandatory for middle aged children in the Uighur region alone to go to boarding school. What does this mean? These kids are not allowed to grow up with their parents.

They're not allowed to speak their language. At their boarding school, they're only allowed to speak Chinese. They're not allowed to speak Uighur. And the parents, they say, well, I've got this elder. I've got this mom, grandpa, he's sickly.

I got to take care of him. Don't worry, we got you. We've got a got a elder care facility. We're going to put your parents and your grandparents in there. And so now people are and this is a quote liberated to work.

They are unburdened from their families and commitments and cultures to go and be somewhere else. So it's forced family separation. It's forced migration. All these hallmarks of genocide. But even if, and I want to say this and I'll let it go first after that.

Let's say genocide, that word is a bridge too far for you. How about crimes against humanity? It's patently, without doubt, but, you know, crimes against humanity. And so sometimes I think, let's just not use the word genocide, that's fine.

Justin Dillon: Evil may not, repeat, but it it it does rhyme. And when you start matching up slogans with freedom and work, I think we've seen them before.

Laura Murphy: Yeah. And there are banners in these factories that say things like that, like, work will liberate you. And when you see them, it's shocking. You catch your breath because it is such And when they first started building the internment camps, they called them concentrated camps. And they would have big signs.

It'd be like number four concentrated camp. And we were just like, did no one vet these phrases? Did you not think for a second about what's going on? You're saying the quiet part out loud here. It's really gruesome.

Justin Dillon: Oh, so maybe you can explain I don't think people understand.

Laura Murphy: Yeah. A lot

Justin Dillon: of people listening don't understand that this exists, that people shell out their their citizens and collect money for the state. Can you explain that

Laura Murphy: a little bit? So in this case, you might be transferred to a factory that's just down the road, or you might be transferred to a factory that is thousands of miles away from home. And the basic idea is that they want everyone in a job, absolutely every single person in a job. And people in China, there's real significant racism against Uighur people. And this is part of what fuels this system.

But people think that Uighur people are lazy. They think that they're convinced by Islam that they will be that they that they don't need to work in this life, that they'll be rewarded in the next day. This is like completely bananas idea about what it means to be Uighur, really racist. And and it's not borne out by the fact that is significant poverty in the Uighur region, but it's not for lack of working.

Justin Dillon: I mean, don't we all kind of doesn't doesn't every country have like a, oh, this group or that group? You know, you hear it, you see the rolled eyes, obviously the state doesn't get involved in as many of the, but we do have this embedded like, that group over there isn't as good as this group.

Laura Murphy: Yeah.

Justin Dillon: It's just in this case, the state acted on it. Yeah. And that's, I think that's, it's significant to understand. I, so tell me if I have this right, just for people to understand, I'm Justin, I work at Freedom, I'm in, I work in the Bay Area. What you're saying is if if if I was working there, they could come along and go, actually, we don't want you in the Bay Area anymore.

We're gonna send you to Seattle. And you're no longer gonna be a CEO. You're going to be working, you know, in accounting or whatever, and your family's not coming with you, and we're not gonna tell you when you get to go back. That's is that That's Is that what I'm living with? If that's

Laura Murphy: That's right. And typically it's for people who farmers, who are impoverished, right? So when the camp when when there were internment camps, there were people who were dentists and teachers who were working as seamstresses in the internment camps. And that's that's probably that's happening in the prisons now too, right? But the labor transfer program is directed at it's called a poverty alleviation program.

And if if in fact everyone consented to this, it could be a really transformational social services program.

Justin Dillon: So on the theme of saying the quiet part out loud.

Laura Murphy: Mhmm.

Justin Dillon: Why care as Americans? This sounds like an over their problem. And there's over their problems everywhere. Why you said something that to protect consumers. That sounds grandiose.

We're protecting consumers by getting involved in the lives of Muslims in China?

Laura Murphy: Why? So I would like to think that we all care very much the lives of people all over the world. I care about people that I don't know, groups of people I've never heard of, places I've never been. I care about all those folks and I care very deeply about the way I actually care very deeply about the way the goods I buy affect people's lives who I'll never meet. That matters to me deeply.

And I would like it if everybody were that way, but that's not really the case. That's not always the case, but I do believe that most consumers. Would like to believe that their their products are not made with forced labor, and they would also like it to be someone else's job to figure it out And right? And that's fair enough. You know?

Justin Dillon: Can't figure out.

Laura Murphy: They can't figure

Justin Dillon: it out. Look.

Laura Murphy: I there's nothing

Justin Dillon: you know, so I I've been chasing this idea for fifteen years. Most people are good. And most people don't want the toil of their labor to be spent on exploitative labor for someone else. No one would most people would not tolerate if they could see that happen. The problem is they can't see it.

Yeah. And why, and the reason the UFLPA is so important for that value, and by the way, it's not an American value. That's, it's absolutely And I would argue it's global in China as well. I don't think this is a national value of not wanting people to be exploited. This is a this is a human thing.

There is no perfect supply chain. There is no perfect purchase, but they are getting better. And we've maybe you can talk about before we talk about globally, talk about the successes around the solar industry and aluminum and and all these different industries that have had a real impact because of these bans coming out of from the UFLPA.

Laura Murphy: The UFLPA and some enforcement of the of the 1930 Tariff Act actually early on meant that the solar industry had to respond at the time and respond by shifting their supply chain significantly because they were so embedded in Xinjiang. At the time, everyone said, that's it. We're not going to be able to meet our climate goals in The United States. We've completely thrown our hopes out of the window doing what we need to do in terms of solar installations in The United States. And human rights is the impediment.

And here you are, Laura, you're pitting human rights against the fate of the planet. And at the time, I was really concerned, but one of the things I kept saying was like, who is it that we're saving the planet for? And then

Justin Dillon: again, we're not saving the planet for the people who work the hardest?

Laura Murphy: Yeah, I think that neglect them, at least when we look at whose land we co op to advance our climate goals, who gets polluted, who gets a say in how these things work. But I have good news for you. And that is that despite all these dire predictions that paying attention to human rights would completely crush all of our ambitions for addressing the climate crisis, We, in fact, are moving towards our climate goals faster than even the most optimistic person in 2020 would have ever predicted. We are producing more modules. We are installing more modules.

We're moving more quickly. We've got a more diverse supply chain. We've got more, more countries moving into the production from soup to nuts of of the whole supply chain.

Justin Dillon: Directly tied to to UFLPA and addressing the solar industry or solar production out of Sindhom.

Laura Murphy: Yeah. And and this is because everyone said everyone said, look, we are not going to buy solar modules anymore that were made with polysilicon or anything from the Uighur region. CBP enforced against it. CBP really held the solar industry to this And more than any other industry. And and, you know, there might be some complaints about that.

Like, what about everybody else? And I do think CBP needs to be enforcing against other industries because we can see what success it is when they actually enforce.

Justin Dillon: Yeah. Separate the wins. Absolutely. It's a great story. It's a great story that started with protecting people and ended up with an industry flourishing.

I think that we don't have enough

Laura Murphy: of

Justin Dillon: those stories, we don't have the imagination to recognize that when you protect those who are working in supply chains, You are working you are moving towards flourishing for people and for for companies. That's a it's a that's not it sounds like there's that's not just a a slogan. That's that's a case study.

Laura Murphy: Well, and that's what you were saying about, like, oh, this is human rights. And I like to remind people that that that this is this is about human rights. The top of the UFLPA where it says, like, what kind of law it is. It says human rights. It doesn't say trade.

Right? It doesn't say it's a trade law. It says human rights. But it is also about leveling the playing field for legitimate business. What was happening in Xinjiang was not only that they were using forced labor, but there were massive state subsidies.

There was no environmental protections. They were using coal energy to make green energy. All these things artificially deflate the price of goods in a way that harms American businesses. It harms European businesses. We've seen European, Korean, other companies go under because the Chinese government has made it so that they they allow oversupply.

The Chinese government has made it so that the price of of of solar panels, for instance, is so low that no one can actually compete. The price is below the production price. So

Justin Dillon: I love that. Yeah. Think that that is something that every listener needs to understand, that two things can be true at one time. Something can be fair from a market's perspective and right from a human rights perspective at the same time.

Laura Murphy: At the same time.

Justin Dillon: And we we saw this with the Trump administration and and some of the appointees coming in, and many of them, you know, as as you know, big behind the UFLPA and and and proponents of it, Rubio and others. And we've also you you'd hear, even at I believe J. D. Vance, I'd have to don't quote me on this, but just, like, the way that he would talk about this is, this is unfair.

Laura Murphy: I think we need a carrot and a stick though. I think one of the things that's really important is that the UFLPA is a really it's a bludgeon. It is a really hard stick. But with the IRA we had, and this is an important piece of this puzzle, it wasn't just the UFLPA did it. The gave, the Inflation Reduction Act, gave businesses incentives to move business to The United States.

So we saw European companies that were being shuttered because they did not have incentives and they were competing against China, moved to start building supply chains in The United States. And so what we need is a situation where we have both pieces of that puzzle. And I worry that we're taking apart the carrots for business to continue doing work. And if we do that, we're going to find that the stick isn't enough. And I think that that's happening in Europe.

And so we can move to your global thing. I think we've got a sea change happening in the new forced labor regulation, corporate sustainability due diligence directive, CS triple D. These things are a part of this sea change I'm talking about. But one, I think corporate lobbyists are trying to get them to water that down and not have much teeth. And that really, it's not going to do the work that it needs to do to level the playing field if it works that way.

We're gonna

Justin Dillon: have Yeah.

Laura Murphy: Yeah. It's troubling. But I do see this shift happening, but I think that what governments and businesses need to understand is that robust enforcement levels the playing field among your importers, right? It means if we're right, it means that you all know what you're getting into. You all know what you're what you have to address.

And it means that if you do right by your supply chain and by your by your customers, by shifting your supply chains. You know that your competitors are going to do the same, and so we want robust enforcement to happen so that it's fair for those who do the right thing.

Justin Dillon: And and it sounds like we want, based on current events, we want robust enforcement, universally across different purchasing We There was a story just came out about how The UK is now a dumping ground for goods coming out of Xinjiang, and and I haven't dug too deep into that regardless of how much of that is true. It sounds like a great headline. I know that Europe is is is moving towards a a forced labor ban in and of itself, and so give us, like, three steps that companies can start to take right now. They don't have to work overnight, but, like, what should they be not thinking about? What should they be doing right now when it comes to their supply chains?

Laura Murphy: Yeah. The most important thing is don't wait. Do not wait. You don't want to

Justin Dillon: show

Laura Murphy: up with your goods and have it stopped. Expensive. It's painful. The paperwork is gnarly. You have a short window period to put together.

You don't wait.

Justin Dillon: Don't wait to do what?

Laura Murphy: Don't wait. And that's that. Don't wait to number two, take a risk based approach, right? Like, sit down with the Department of Labor's list of goods made with some forced labor. Look and see which of the products on that list are in your supply chain or part of what you make, are things that you're selling and see where are the worst forms of forced labor.

Talk to somebody if you need to who understands forced labor. Where are the worst forms of forced labor occurring? And where is my highest risk? Don't think we need to look. You can't.

If you make a solar panel, it's easy. There's only a couple of things that go into a solar panel.

Justin Dillon: But

Laura Murphy: if you make a car, you got 30,000 parts. And I did a study of tracing automotive supply chains. It was horrible. It's really hard. But you need a team in place.

So the third thing is get a team in place. Have experts that you actually empowered to do this work to see like once you've identified the risks for them to really dig deep and don't just ask for self declarations from your suppliers. That's not going be enough anymore. The world has changed. You need to actually know what's going on in those factories and you need to know deeper than your first and second tier.

So mapping those things out, but really empowering the people in your compliance team and in your sourcing team to do this well. Because a lot of times you might hire somebody, but they don't actually get to have C suite attention. They don't really get to Yeah.

Justin Dillon: That's it. I was gonna say, what is your message to the C suite for these departments? Because they can very easily become disempowered in a procurement team or a compliance team and just become an accessory. Laura, you are such a I don't wanna embarrass you, but you're a historic figure in this time, in this era. You have chosen to take all of your smarts and point them towards the lives of people, most of whom you'll never meet.

So as far as I'm concerned, that's historic. What are you working on next? What can we expect next in the line of hits from Laura Murphy?

Laura Murphy: You know, actually, I'm really interested in this international advocacy for forced labor import bans. So a lot of what I'm thinking about, what I wanted to do if I, you know, if, you know, I was a political appointee. And so when Biden left, I left. That's how my job was always set up. But if we had stayed for another four years, my plan was to work on figuring out how to make to encourage other countries to adopt these kinds of laws and to create a harmonized system where we're doing the best we can across very different jurisdictions to to encourage companies to do the right thing.

Justin Dillon: Laura, thank you so much. I've wanted to do this conversation for so long, and I think that you make very complex, very difficult things just very palatable. And, honestly, you've inspired me, and and and I know that anyone listening to this, they're gonna feel the same. So thank you so much for coming on. This is The One Thing, the part of our show where we dig further into one idea from the interview.

Doctor. Laura Murphy is clearly on a mission. Her research and advocacy around UFLPA, the Uighur Forced Labor Prevention Act, has impacted millions of lives and possibly changed trade forever. I found that people who work and live with a mission usually end up in some pretty surprising places like Laura did, becoming a political appointee to the federal government. Now her story reminds me of another woman who accidentally found herself on a mission to end exploitation and supply chains as well.

At the turn of the twentieth century, the world was becoming increasingly interested in the commodity of rubber. In Europe and America, bicycles were taking off. They were everywhere. The automobile was just getting started, and factories were using rubber to coat telegraph wires and run their factories. The consumers benefiting from this commodity had no idea where it was coming from.

But in the Congo Free State, known today as the Democratic Republic Of Congo, rubber was being extracted through terror and forced labor. And keep in mind, slavery had been outlawed in England and The United States by this point. But King Leopold II of Belgium controlled the Congo Free State and ran it like it was his own private company, forcing entire villages into forest to tap wild vines. Miss your quota, and your wife or child might be held hostage. Miss it again and they might lose her hand or foot.

Enter Alice Harris, a young British missionary to the Congo Free State who unknowingly entered into this chaos with only a Kodak Brownie camera. Now one day, a local villager came to her house with the severed hands of his daughter, hoping that someone might be able to help. Alice quickly grabbed her camera to photograph the grieving father, and from there, she kept on taking pictures, documenting children with stumps where hands should be, fathers staring at the bodies of their mutilated sons, entire villages emptied out photos. These images started to travel around the world. Alice was taking her pictures to churches, basements, and lecture halls in London, Boston, and New York.

She projected them on the walls and was building a coalition of the willing. They even reached the most famous man in the world at that point, Mark Twain. Ordinary people who rode bicycles and dreamed of owning a car were seeing the hidden cost of these tubes and hoses. Suddenly, rubber was not just a commodity, it was the story of human suffering. Public outrage followed, campaigns were launched, and pressure mounted.

And within a few years, king Leopold was forced to give up his rule of Congo. Alice Seeley Harris showed the world something that still rings true today. Supply chains are not invisible. Alice and Laura have shown us that behind every product, there are people. And sometimes a single photograph or a research report from a university can make those people's lives visible.

Thank you for listening. Don't forget to subscribe to our show so that we can let you know about new episodes. Cheers.

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