When Protecting Workers Backfires: Anti-Forced-Labor Laws and Uyghur Discrimination

当保护工人适得其反：反强迫劳动法与对维吾尔人的歧视

Imagine a young Uyghur woman named Amina who grew up in a rural village in Xinjiang. She heard about factory jobs in eastern China that could pay enough to lift her family out of poverty. With pride and hope, she moved thousands of miles to start work in a large textile plant. For Amina and many others, this was not slavery at all but an exercise of agency – a chance to earn wages and improve their lives. But the world’s response to the Xinjiang crisis has turned that simple dream into a moral trap. Laws like the U.S. Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) were passed to stop any goods made with coercion. These laws are rooted in noble values – freedom from slavery, human dignity, equal rights. Yet on the ground, an unintended consequence is emerging: companies, fearing sanctions, are often refusing to hire any Uyghurs at all. In effect, a campaign to protect the Uyghurs from forced labor is pushing them into unemployment and discrimination.

The headlines tell the origin story. Starting around 2019, reports of mass detentions and “re-education camps” in Xinjiang shocked the world. In response, Western governments moved to put trade pressure on Beijing. The U.S. Congress, for instance, enacted the UFLPA in 2021, which presumes that all products made in Xinjiang involve forced labor (unless proven otherwise). The intent was clear: “turn off the financial spigot” for forced labor. The European Union and other democracies have followed with similar bans on goods linked to Xinjiang. But the Chinese government simply shifted tactics. Investigations by The New York Times, The Bureau of Investigative Journalism and Der Spiegel revealed that state programs have been quietly relocating Uyghur, Kazakh, and Kyrgyz workers out of Xinjiang into factories across China. In other words, the Xinjiang question didn’t disappear – it just moved. The factories might no longer be in Xinjiang, but the workers were still predominantly Uyghur.

What happened next is the tragic irony. As soon as these labor-transfer schemes came to light, compliance managers at factories and brand headquarters around the world panicked. The message was: if there’s any chance an Uyghur worker touched your product, it might violate new laws or import bans. For many companies, the safest option became to avoid the risk entirely. And so we have seen factories in China start to implement what amounts to racial profiling. In mid-2020, Radio Free Asia reported that a major supplier to Nike in eastern China announced it had “stopped recruiting new employees from [Xinjiang]” and that “all remaining employees from [Xinjiang] have now returned home”. In plain terms, that factory simply decided: it will hire no Uyghurs. Nike’s public statement made it clear this was a response to scrutiny over forced labor. But the result was chilling: working-age Uyghurs who had done nothing wrong were told they could no longer work, effectively because of their ethnicity.

This is not an isolated incident. Commentators have noted that UFLPA’s rules – for example, its “entity list” of at-risk companies – sweep in any company that has sizable numbers of Xinjiang-origin workers. In practice, that means a factory hundreds of miles away from Xinjiang that employs dozens of Uyghurs is viewed with suspicion. The forced-labor laws don’t distinguish between the government’s brutality and a person’s choices. As one Chinese legal analysis bluntly put it, any firm that “directly does business with Xinjiang or [engages] in large-scale hiring of Xinjiang region employees” can be blacklisted under UFLPA. To avoid being labeled “tainted,” companies are telling their Xinjiang-origin workers to leave. Even the Chinese state media now laments this outcome: a recent Xinhua editorial ironically acknowledges that these import bans have forced upon employers a “de-facto hiring discrimination” against Uyghurs and other minorities. In other words, the effort to stamp out alleged forced labor has turned into a broad brush that paints an entire ethnic group as toxic.

This turn of events clashes deeply with Western liberal values. We pride ourselves on equality of opportunity and the freedom to work. We know from our own history that punishing people for where they come from – rather than what they do – is fundamentally wrong. It is antithetical to the civil rights ideal that one’s merit, not one’s birth, should determine one’s prospects. Imagine an American lawmaker suggesting that a factory should refuse to hire anyone with an Irish accent or a Muslim name because of fear they might be coerced. It would be unthinkable – a blatant violation of anti-discrimination principles. Yet the logic being applied to Uyghurs is remarkably similar. Because the Xinjiang policies make any Uyghur worker look suspicious by default, factories are effectively saying: we can’t afford to take the chance. This is collective punishment: a whole people losing jobs due to suspicion sown by state-level abuses.

Nor is this just a theoretical danger. Scholars and labor activists warn that forced-labor bans can backfire. A report by the Modern Slavery Policy and Evidence Centre, led by academics, points out exactly this risk: blanket bans may cause companies to “cut and run” rather than engage with workers and suppliers, potentially leaving vulnerable workers unemployed. They note that in other contexts (like UK garment sweatshops), harsh enforcement sometimes pushed workers into even worse conditions or destitution. The concern is that the tools meant to protect workers instead make them invisible. In effect, a legal regime intended to empower Uyghurs ends up empowering the paranoia of employers, sidelining the very laborers it set out to defend.

For the Uyghurs themselves, the human cost is stark. These are men and women whose families are often in rural poverty. Many willingly took jobs far from home, sometimes under pressure from local officials but often motivated by the chance of a steady income. By Western standards, we’d see that as ordinary employment – not unlike a migrant taking seasonal work or a student working part-time. When that income is abruptly cut off, it isn’t just an economic loss; it’s a blow to their dignity and freedom. It says to a Uyghur young man, “Your labor is not welcome.” It relegates a skilled seamstress in her prime to the ranks of the unemployed, all because her ethnic identity became entangled with geopolitical conflict. The Uyghur economist Ilham Tohti long ago warned that unemployment is one of the biggest barriers to harmony in Xinjiang. Ironically, the foreign laws aiming to protect Uyghurs may be contributing to that very unemployment.

Worse yet, the moral message gets twisted. In the name of ending “forced labor,” these policies risk turning Western markets into a kind of club that Uyghurs cannot join – or can only join under arbitrary scrutiny. We champion freedom of contract and enterprise, but we also champion nondiscrimination and human dignity. This situation pits those values against each other. On one side is a just desire: nobody should profit from slavery. On the other side is a fundamental right: people should have the chance to work without being shunned for their ethnicity or birthplace. Our commitment to justice must find a balance so we don’t end up erecting barriers against the very people we mean to help.

In fact, history has taught us the perils of sweeping policies that stigmatize entire communities. After the U.S. passed stricter immigration and labor laws in the 1980s, researchers found that many employers became so afraid of penalties that they simply refused to hire anyone with a Latino-sounding name or questionable paperwork, regardless of legality (a phenomenon seen with the Immigration Reform and Control Act). Similarly, the post-9/11 era in America saw incidents where employers or airports made snap judgments about individuals because of their appearance or accent, a practice we later criticized. We know from civil rights struggles that stamping out injustice requires precision: target the crime, not the ethnicity. Otherwise good laws can turn into another form of injustice.

So what do we do? We must remind ourselves of the principles at stake. Due process and evidence should govern the fight against forced labor, not guilt by association. Instead of broad bans that blanket all Uyghur-made goods, we should demand transparency and accountability: allow legitimate businesses to certify that their workers are free and fairly employed. Encourage independent audits and worker testimonials, not blanket exclusions. Western companies can and should do better diligence – and governments can help by clarifying that ethical remedies are solutions, not worker expulsions.

Above all, our goal should be to empower Uyghur workers, not make them invisible. A better approach might be to work with civil society and international monitors, to help ensure any Uyghur in a factory truly has choices and rights, rather than telling factories “just don’t hire any Uyghurs.” If freedom and opportunity are truly our values, we should not turn away from the table of production those people most in need of a seat. Uyghurs fleeing poverty in Xinjiang should not find themselves locked out of factories by well-meaning policies abroad.

The forced-labor bans originated from a desire to not fund oppression – a noble cause. But unless we carefully guard the application of these laws, we risk turning them into tools of discrimination. It’s a bitter paradox: in trying to strike a blow for human rights, we must be careful not to inflict new wounds on the very community we intend to protect. The Uyghur crisis is complex and urgent, but scapegoating individuals or denying them work is not the answer. Instead, let us demand smarter, fairer policies: those that see each worker as a person with rights, not merely as a data point in international politics. Only then can we say we truly stand for freedom and dignity – for all, including the Uyghur people.