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UFLPA Enforcement vs. Apparel's Supplier Codes of Conduct

The UFLPA presumes goods from Xinjiang involve forced labor. Customs has detained billions in imports. Major apparel brands' supplier codes said otherwise.

By The WokeCorp Team
Container ships at a major commercial port loaded with shipping containers
US Customs and Border Protection has authority under the UFLPA to detain shipments presumed to involve Xinjiang-sourced components. The burden of proof is on the importer. · Photo via Pexels. Pexels License.

In June 2022, the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act took effect. The law does something unusual in trade enforcement: it creates a rebuttable presumption that all goods produced in Xinjiang, China involve forced labor, and places the burden on the importer to prove otherwise. In the two years before the law passed, most major apparel brands' supplier codes of conduct stated that forced labor was prohibited throughout their supply chains.

The UFLPA enforcement record tells you what those codes were actually detecting.

Key findings

  • The UFLPA, signed June 21, 2022, creates a rebuttable presumption that goods made in whole or in part in Xinjiang involve forced labor.
  • CBP maintains the UFLPA Entity List of companies in Xinjiang whose goods trigger the presumption; it also applies to goods traceable to Xinjiang-based inputs even from non-listed entities.
  • From July 2022 through early 2025, CBP detained or denied entry to billions of dollars in goods under UFLPA authority, with textiles/apparel among the largest categories.
  • Brands whose supplier codes prohibited forced labor were simultaneously sourcing from supply chains with documented Xinjiang exposure, per the Australian Strategic Policy Institute's 2020 report.
  • The ASPI report identified 83 major brands with documented links to Uyghur labor transfer programs, including Nike, Gap, H&M, and others, based on factory-level supply chain mapping.
  • Nike, among others, lobbied against provisions of the UFLPA during the legislative process, per a 2021 US House committee report.

The audit detection gap

How did brands with explicit anti-forced-labor supplier codes end up with Xinjiang exposure? The supply chain structure explains most of it. A brand sourcing a t-shirt from a manufacturer in Guangdong, China typically does not source the cotton used in that t-shirt. The manufacturer buys yarn from a spinner, who bought fiber from a trader, who bought it from a Xinjiang gin. The brand's code of conduct applies to the direct supplier. The Xinjiang cotton is three tiers back.

Standard third-party audit programs (BSCI, SA8000, SEDEX, and others) audit the direct manufacturing facility on labor conditions, safety, and management systems. They do not trace inputs to origin. A factory can have a clean SA8000 audit and still be producing garments from Xinjiang cotton because the cotton was already woven into fabric before it arrived.

This is why the UFLPA's rebuttable-presumption design is the only enforcement mechanism that works for this specific problem: it reverses the burden, requiring importers to trace their supply chains all the way to origin, rather than relying on the importer's own audit program.

Workers at industrial sewing machines in a large apparel manufacturing facility

Standard factory audits assess working conditions at the direct manufacturing facility. The cotton's origin, potentially from Xinjiang, is already processed into fabric by the time it arrives; tracing it requires supply chain mapping that most brands did not routinely perform. Photo via Pexels. Pexels License.

The ASPI report and corporate responses

The March 2020 Australian Strategic Policy Institute report identified 83 major global brands with documented or probable links to factories using Uyghur labor transfer workers, people relocated from Xinjiang to factories in other provinces under Chinese government programs ASPI and US authorities characterized as forced labor. The report named specific factories and matched them against brand supplier lists.

Brands responded in various ways. Some acknowledged the findings and committed to investigation. Some denied the specific factory connections. Some pointed to their audit programs as evidence of compliance. The difficulty with the last response is that standard audit programs don't detect government-sponsored labor transfer programs; the coercion exists outside the factory's working conditions on audit day.

Nike was among the brands named. The 2021 House Select Committee report found Nike among companies that lobbied against provisions of the UFLPA during the legislative process, specifically provisions that would have created the rebuttable presumption that goods made in Xinjiang involve forced labor. Nike has not disputed being engaged in the legislative process; its position was that the law as written would be challenging to comply with given supply chain complexity.

The United States Capitol building west facade on a clear day

The UFLPA's passage followed years of legislative effort. The bill received broad bipartisan support despite industry lobbying against provisions that would make supply chain tracing mandatory at the importer level. Photo via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

How effective has UFLPA enforcement been at stopping forced labor in apparel?

CBP publishes monthly UFLPA statistics on its website: the number of shipments reviewed, detained, and denied entry, broken down by industry. The aggregate through early 2025 shows billions of dollars in detained goods across electronics (solar panels, in particular), textiles, and other sectors.

The textile and apparel sector consistently appears in the top categories. This reflects two things: the size of the industry's sourcing in China, and the genuine difficulty of demonstrating, by clear and convincing evidence, that a garment's supply chain contains no Xinjiang-sourced cotton.

Several importers have chosen to develop supply chain tracing systems, fiber-level DNA testing, blockchain-based provenance tracking, supplier contracts requiring Xinjiang-free cotton certification, to document compliance. These systems cost money and require supplier cooperation. Brands that spent years operating on supplier codes of conduct rather than direct supply chain tracing are now building that infrastructure retroactively.

Workers at sewing machines in a textile garment factory floor

Workers at sewing machines in a textile garment factory floor. Photo: EqualStock IN via Pexels. Pexels License.. Pexels free to use.

The compliance infrastructure that emerged

By 2024 and 2025, major apparel brands had developed or accelerated several compliance approaches in response to UFLPA enforcement.

Cotton tracing technology became a specific industry investment. The ORITAIN system uses isotope and chemical composition analysis to identify cotton's geographic origin with scientific confidence. Textile Exchange and Cotton at Work developed supply chain mapping tools that trace cotton through spinning and weaving stages. Several brands, including PVH (Calvin Klein, Tommy Hilfiger) and Hanesbrands, publicly announced investments in traceable cotton sourcing that would allow them to demonstrate Xinjiang-free supply chains with documentation.

Blockchain-based traceability systems, which log supply chain transactions from gin to garment on an immutable ledger, were adopted by some suppliers working with European brands first. The EU's forthcoming forced labor regulation, modeled loosely on the UFLPA but applying to goods sold in the EU market from any origin, accelerated European brand investment in traceability that their US peers then applied to UFLPA compliance.

H&M, one of the brands named in the ASPI report, publicly exited sourcing relationships with specific Chinese suppliers that ASPI and subsequent investigations had linked to labor transfer programs. H&M's disclosures about those supplier exits were more granular than most brands' responses. Inditex (Zara) similarly made sourcing commitments specific enough to be auditable.

The compliance cost is real. A brand that had been sourcing cotton from Chinese traders without origin documentation has to either build traceability infrastructure or restructure its supply chain to use exclusively non-China cotton. Neither option is free. Brands that built traceability infrastructure early, whether for EU regulatory compliance or internal sustainability commitment, were better positioned for UFLPA compliance than brands that had relied on code-of-conduct certification.

The lesson from the enforcement data: "we have supplier codes" was never adequate for this specific risk. The codes addressed conditions at the point of manufacture. The risk was origin of inputs three tiers back.

The WokeCorp assessment

The commitment. Supplier codes of conduct prohibiting forced labor were real documents, widely adopted, and broadly audited. The problem was not bad intent; it was an enforcement model designed for the wrong threat model.

The gap. Standard audit programs detect working conditions at the point of manufacture. They do not detect the origin of inputs three supply chain tiers back. The UFLPA created an enforcement mechanism calibrated to what actually matters: where the material came from, not just what the factory audit said.

The lobbying dimension. The ASPI report preceded the law. Brands that lobbied against the rebuttable-presumption provision while ASPI was documenting their supply chain exposure were, at minimum, resisting the only enforcement tool adequate to their own known risk profile. That's the same pattern as Nike's UFLPA lobbying covered in Nike's Kaepernick Campaign vs. Its Supply Chain.

Sources

  • Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, Public Law 117-78, June 21, 2022. Verified June 2026.
  • US Customs and Border Protection, UFLPA Statistics. CBP.gov. Verified June 2026.
  • Australian Strategic Policy Institute, "Uyghurs for Sale," March 2020. Verified June 2026.
  • US House Select Committee on Strategic Competition, Interim Report, 2022. Verified June 2026.