By Dave McKee
Every week, it seems, a politician or pundit or media outlet is talking about the issue of forced labour. This is particularly so in the wake of Donald Trump’s tariff war and the resultant efforts by the Liberal government to strengthen trade relationships with other countries around the world.
This narrative becomes especially sharp in the context of trade with China, which Ottawa and its allies charge is imposing a widespread forced labour regime throughout the Xinjiang region in the northwest of the country. Any web search on the issue provides hundreds of accusations of coercion, forcible transfer and even enslavement.
Assertions that China utilizes forced labour also find an echo within the labour movement. In response to Ottawa’s announcement that it will lower tariffs on Chinese-made EVs and allow 49,000 of the vehicles into Canada’s 2-million-vehicle market each year, the Canadian Labour Congress protested that the deal “ignores China’s ongoing human rights abuses including the documented use of forced labour.”
Of course, forced labour should be a concern for working people all over the world – just as the working-class movement has a long record of fighting to eradicate child labour and payment in company scrip. But is this problem really that well “documented”?
Despite the ubiquity of the charge that China uses forced labour, few specifics are ever offered and scant evidence is provided. The same web searches that produce hundreds of accusations also produce of black holes of non-detail. Even the January 22 statement from the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights provides no specifics to back up its sweeping condemnation of China’s labour practices.
Instead of seeing evidence that China uses forced labour, the public is harangued into believing it is so, to the point that anything is taken as proof. We have been so ideologically softened on this question that we accept it to be “true because we say it is true.”
What makes this really sad is that somewhere along the way, in the midst of all the Cold War propaganda against China, we have lost sight of some of the real examples of forced labour, with plenty of concrete evidence, right under our noses.
That is, the prison system in the US and Canada.
A 2022 report from the American Civil Liberties Union found that prison labour in the US is a $11 billion industry involving 800,000 incarcerated workers who are paid an average of 13-52 cents per hour, with some receiving no pay at all.
Worse, the government takes up to 80 percent of these wages for “room and board” and other costs, leaving 70 percent of those workers with insufficient income to pay the prison for basic necessities like hygiene products, medical care and phone calls.
Prison labour in the US is used for a range of work including public works, building construction, emergency operations like fighting wildfires, and goods and services produced by state-owned and private companies.
In April, a group of human rights lawyers in Canada called on the federal government to ban automotive imports from the US that use prison labour. Unsurprisingly, Ottawa skirted the issue and referred the matter to the Border Services Agency.
That weak response may very well be because this country itself makes extensive use of prison labour.
CORCAN is an agency within Correctional Service Canada which runs prison labour programs in federal institutions. It “employs” 12,000 prisoners in 36 prisons across the country, with extensive business lines including textiles, manufacturing, construction, services and agriculture. The goods and services are sold to other government departments and agencies.
Prison labour in Canada – at the federal level – is paid a maximum of $6.90 a day (before deductions) regardless of the type of work. Over an eight-hour day, that works out to just 86 cents per hour.
So, yes, we do need to do something about forced labour. But let’s start here at home, rather than succumbing to Cold War Sinophobia.
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