NEI Webinar: Forced Labor from an SME Perspective

The U.S. government has, since the repeal of the consumptive demand clause under the 2016 Trade Facilitation and Trade Enforcement Act (TFTEA), taken an increasingly aggressive approach to combatting forced labor. With an expanded set of legislative, regulatory, technological, and intelligence tools at its disposal, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has taken forced labor enforcement to a historically unprecedented level. This tendency is manifest in the large (and growing) number of Withhold Release Orders (WROs), findings, and detentions associated with the 2016-2023 time period.

These developments present serious compliance risks for the trade, generally, and SMEs, in particular. Significantly, transshipment and third country processing practices make these compliance risks relevant to imports from all countries – not just, as recent headlines might suggest, to merchandise sourced from the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) of China. While importers can manage this compliance risk through the timely taking of the appropriate due diligence measures, experience shows that the satisfaction of this burden can be a heavy lift, especially for entities with limited resources and/or import experience. Given the nature of the influences and considerations that are currently shaping U.S. trade policy, there is nothing on the horizon to suggest the abatement of this situation.

Join the NCBFAA’s NEI on October 31, 2023 as international trade attorney Bob Kossick (Harris Sliwoski) and supply chain management expert Philip Duplisey (Mesur.io/Earthstream) break down everything SMEs need to know about managing forced labor risk. Topics to be addressed in this webinar include:

• An introduction to forced labor: definition, indicators, and rationale

• The U.S. forced labor framework

• Forced labor mitigation measures and challenges

• Bringing machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) to bear on the challenge of managing forced labor risk

• Big picture developments and key takeaways