Dominican Exporter Did Use Forced Labor in Manufacturing Process, Petitioners Claim
CBP was right to find that Dominican aluminum exporter Kingtom Aluminio relied on forced labor to produce its merchandise, defendant-intervenors led by Aluminum Extruders Council and the United Steel, Paper and Forestry union said June 16 (Kingtom Aluminio v. United States, CIT # 24-00264).
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They said that Kingtom was wrong to claim its workers aren’t being forced to work involuntarily (see 2502200013). Record evidence -- including “ample evidence” in the same document Kingtom used to support its claim -- shows otherwise, they said.
Nor was the government’s evidence “stale, uncorroborated, and contradicted” by other record documents, they said. Parts of it had been verified by U.S. officials’ own observations, they said. And the Dominican government itself found labor violations in some of Kingtom’s facilities and shut them down in July 2024, they said.
They also said that CBP hadn’t been wrong to rely on the International Labour Organization’s published indicators as a guideline for determining the presence of forced labor. The guidelines aren’t inconsistent with statute, which doesn’t itself dictate any particular approach, they argued. Further, the indicators have been used by federal courts making forced labor determinations.
Using ILO’s indicators also didn’t mean the agency didn’t consider the voluntariness of Kingtom’s labor as part of its analysis, they said. It did, they said, despite Kingtom’s claim otherwise. Further, ILO’s framework also requires a finding that the labor being analyzed wasn’t voluntary, so using it “necessarily” meant CBP considered the issue, they said.