A group of major U.S. businesses wants the government to hide key import data — a move trade experts say would make it more difficult for Americans to link the products they buy to labor abuse overseas.
The Commercial Customs Operations Advisory Committee is made up of executives from 20 companies, including Walmart, General Motors and Intel. The committee is authorized by U.S. Customs and Border Protection to advise on ways to streamline trade regulations.
Last week — ahead of closed-door meetings starting Monday in Washington with senior officials from CBP and other federal agencies — the executives quietly unveiled proposals they said would modernize import and export rules to keep pace with trade volumes that have nearly quintupled in the past three decades. The Associated Press obtained a copy of the proposal from a committee member.
Among the proposed changes: making data collected from vessel manifests confidential.
The information is vitally important for researchers and reporters seeking to hold corporations accountable for the mistreatment of workers in their foreign supply chains.
Reports by the AP and other media have documented how large quantities of clothing, electronics and seafood make their way onto U.S. shelves every year as a result of illegal forced labor that engages 28 million people globally, according to the International Labor Organization. Much of that investigative work — whether into clothing made by Uyghurs at internment camps in China’s Xinjiang region, cocoa harvested by children in the Ivory Coast or seafood caught by Philippine fishermen toiling in slave-like conditions — starts with shipping manifests.
“Curtailing access to this information will make it harder for the public to monitor a shipping industry that already functions largely in the shadows,” said Peter Klein, a professor at University of British Columbia, where he runs the Hidden Costs of Global Supply Chains project, an international collaborative between researchers and journalists.
“If anything, CBP should be prioritizing more transparency, opening up records of shipments by air, road and rail as well.