- Chief Compliance Officer and VP of Legal Affairs, Arrow Electronics
By 
Aaron Nicodemus2024-03-11T16:31:00
The first step is admitting there is a problem, and child labor is a growing one in the United States.
In the past, child labor violations might have appeared as a distant concern—something that happens overseas, elsewhere, away. Or, it was considered to be at low risk of occurring in the United States.
As a result, U.S. compliance officers have not been accounting for the possibility of child labor violations in their risk assessments. They weren’t considering how and where child labor violations might be occurring. They weren’t taking into account the potential blowback on their company’s reputation if abuses were found within the labor pool used to develop their company’s product or service.
In short, the U.S. compliance community has not been spending time addressing a problem mistakenly thought to be a rarity.
What’s changed? The driving force is the rising flow of underage migrants coming to the United States.
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The Department of Labor sued three Alabama businesses, including a Hyundai Motor manufacturing plant, for employing a 13-year-old worker on an auto parts assembly line.
It’s been nearly two years since the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act took effect, and as enforcement statistics and recent reports demonstrate, many businesses are still not adequately vetting their supply chains.
The Department of Labor ordered Tennessee-based Tuff Torq Corp. to pay nearly $1.8 million over alleged child labor violations.
The U.S. Department of Commerce unveiled a diagnostic supply chain risk assessment tool, which will “utilize a comprehensive set of indicators to assess structural supply chain risk across the U.S. economy,” the agency said.
Companies will need to tighten up how they monitor their supply chains after a recent U.K. ruling determined that corporates could be open to money laundering charges if they fail to act in cases where they believe there is a risk of forced labor.
A U.S. Senate report found three European automakers—Volkswagen, BMW, and Jaguar Land Rover—sold cars in the United States with parts sourced from a supplier suspected of using forced labor from China’s Xinjiang region.
