WASHINGTON — The finding arrived not with a trade negotiation but with a legal determination, and the distinction matters. On June 2, the Office of the United States Trade Representative concluded that every one of 60 major economies it has spent three months investigating — among them Turkey, China, Japan, the European Union, India, and the United Kingdom — has failed to ban imports made with forced labor. The proposed punishment: new tariffs of up to 12.5 percent on goods from all of them, covering nearly the entire spectrum of American imports.
What makes this development more than a standard trade enforcement action is what it replaces. In February, the Supreme Court struck down the sweeping global tariffs President Donald Trump had imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, ruling that IEEPA does not authorize the president to levy tariffs unilaterally. Trump terminated those tariffs by executive order the same day, and within 96 hours his administration imposed a temporary 10 percent surcharge under a different authority — Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974. That measure has a hard ceiling: it expires around July 24, 2026, and cannot exceed 15 percent or be extended by the president alone.
The Section 301 investigation launched in March was always the endgame. Unlike IEEPA, Section 301 requires a formal public record, a finding of unreasonable or discriminatory trade practices, and a justification for any tariffs that follow. It carries no statutory rate cap and no time limit. The administration appears to have satisfied those procedural requirements, and the findings announced on Tuesday represent the moment the architecture shifts from temporary scaffolding to a potentially permanent structure.
Ambassador Jamieson Greer, the US Trade Representative, framed the determination in stark terms. “The failure of our most important trading partners to address the importation of goods made with forced labor is unacceptable,” he said in a statement issued alongside the findings. “This creates a dynamic where American workers are forced to compete globally on an unlevel playing field. We will no longer tolerate this disparity.”
The proposed tariff structure turns on a single question: does the targeted economy have any prohibition on forced-labor imports? Countries that maintain such a ban, or have committed to one through a bilateral trade agreement with Washington, face a 10 percent additional duty. The remaining economies — which USTR determined includes Turkey, China, India, Brazil, South Korea, Japan, and Switzerland, among others — face a 12.5 percent rate. Canada, the European Union, Mexico, Indonesia, Ecuador, and Pakistan fall into a separate category: they have prohibitions on the books, USTR found, but fail to effectively enforce them. They qualify for the lower 10 percent rate.
The Turkish case is instructive. Ankara has no legal mechanism equivalent to the United States’ Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, which creates a rebuttable presumption that goods from designated regions were produced with forced labor. USTR’s report, covering nearly 500 public comments and testimony from roughly 60 witnesses gathered over April and May, found that the absence of such frameworks in economies like Turkey’s is not a minor administrative gap — it is, in the administration’s reading, an affirmative distortion of global market conditions that disadvantages American producers competing against goods made at artificially suppressed labor costs.
The administration has carved out a narrow set of exemptions. Basic food commodities — beef, tomatoes, bananas, coffee, orange juice — are excluded from the proposed additional duties, as are certain metals, fuels, and industrial chemicals already subject to separate trade measures. The exemptions appear calibrated to limit domestic inflationary pressure, though trade lawyers at Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck noted earlier this year that the administration appears willing to accept some consumer price pain in exchange for restoring a broad tariff structure after IEEPA’s collapse.
The timeline now moves into a comment-and-hearing phase before tariffs can be finalized. Written public comments are due by July 6, 2026. USTR will hold public hearings on July 7 — one day after the comment deadline, and 17 days before Section 122 authority expires. The compression of that calendar is not coincidental: the administration appears to be engineering a seamless handoff from the temporary Section 122 tariffs to the more durable Section 301 regime without allowing imports to revert to pre-IEEPA duty levels.
Whether that transition holds legally is an open question. Legal analysts who testified before USTR warned that Section 301’s procedural requirements were designed precisely to prevent the kind of speed the administration is attempting — the statute normally contemplates investigations of up to 12 months, and the hearings completed in May covered an unusually compressed public record. Companies that failed to submit comments or testify will have limited grounds to seek product exclusions after tariffs are imposed, according to trade law firms who have been circulating client advisories since March. The parallel battle over IEEPA tariff refunds — which US importers are now seeking from the federal government after the Supreme Court’s ruling — illustrates how consequential the legal architecture surrounding these tariffs has become for American businesses.
USTR simultaneously announced a separate mechanism aimed at textiles and apparel: a quota-style provision that would allow a certain volume of clothing imports from some affected economies to enter the United States at a reduced rate. The details of that mechanism are still being worked out in the public comment process, but it signals an awareness in Washington that blanket tariffs on garment-heavy exporters could produce acute disruptions in consumer retail markets before any supply chain adjustment is possible.
For Ankara, the finding arrives at a delicate moment. Turkey has been navigating its position as a transit economy for sanctioned Russian goods and a manufacturing platform for Western brands seeking to diversify out of China, a dual role that has kept it economically relevant to both sides of the US-China rivalry while exposing it to scrutiny from Washington. A 12.5 percent additional tariff — on top of any existing duties — would add meaningful cost to Turkish textile and manufactured goods exports to the United States, sectors that account for a substantial share of bilateral trade. Whether Ankara moves to adopt a forced-labor import prohibition in the coming weeks, which would qualify it for the lower 10 percent rate, is now a live diplomatic question. It has until July 6 to submit written comments to USTR making that case.
The European Union faces a different calculation. Brussels has existing import controls on certain forced-labor goods under its own corporate due diligence directives, but USTR determined those measures do not constitute a sufficiently enforced prohibition — hence the 10 percent rate rather than 12.5, but a rate nonetheless. EU trade officials had been already grappling with Washington’s tariff architecture as Brussels simultaneously deployed its own defensive measures against Chinese overcapacity. The prospect of a new layer of US duties — on top of what the Section 122 regime has already imposed — lands just as EU-US trade talks remain unresolved.
The breadth of the action is what most distinguishes it from conventional trade enforcement. Norway, Australia, New Zealand, Israel — none of them are commonly associated with supply chain forced labor in the way that manufacturing-heavy developing economies are. Their inclusion, as Mayer Brown attorneys observed in a March client alert, reflects the administration’s underlying intent: this is not primarily a forced labor enforcement action. It is a reconstruction of the reciprocal tariff program the Supreme Court dismantled, dressed in the procedural clothing that Section 301 requires.
What remains unresolved is whether that clothing will survive a legal challenge of its own. The administration’s use of Section 301 is not without precedent — the first Trump term produced extensive Section 301 tariffs on China that survived judicial review. But the scope here is categorically different: those were targeted, country-specific actions with detailed findings about Chinese intellectual property theft. This is a simultaneous finding against 60 economies, made in roughly 90 days, on a theory of forced labor that encompasses trading partners with whom the United States has longstanding security alliances and shared labor standards. Courts watching that record may ask harder questions than they did in 2018. The fractures already visible in transatlantic trade politics suggest that even allies are running out of patience with Washington’s approach to commercial relationships.
USTR’s full report on the findings is available on the agency’s website, along with the Federal Register notice setting out the proposed actions and the comment process. The July 7 hearing is likely to be consequential — it may be the last formal checkpoint before a tariff regime affecting the overwhelming majority of US imports becomes the new baseline of American trade law.
