A recent report from Tech Transparency Project highlights relations between Amazon and five Chinese suppliers who use forced labour. According to the published study, Amazon works with these Chinese suppliers knowing that they force members of the Uyghur community to work.
Five Amazon suppliers are affected by forced labor
This ethnic minority is mainly located in the Xinjiang region, in western China. For several years, these Chinese Muslims have been the subject of a number of human rights violations in the country. It is in particular a question internment camps, constant surveillance and therefore forced labor. The report points out that China would use “transfer of labour”to transport Uyghurs from the Xinjiang region to factories all over China.
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the Tech Transparency Project points to five companies on Amazon’s supplier list. They have been publicly denounced as being “directly or indirectly” linked to the forced labor of the Uyghur population in China. These suppliers are responsible for the manufacture of many Amazon-branded products: the Echo, the Fire TV and the Kindle. Luxshare Precision Industry, AcBel Polytech and Lens Technology are the three suppliers that directly use forced labor. The other two companies, GoerTek and Hefei BOE Optoelectronics, are indirectly involved.
Other American giants were still recently working with these same suppliers
This is not the first time that Luxshare and Lens Technology have been singled out for similar accusations. Apple and Tesla also worked with these companies before a report from the washington post does not reveal the reality experienced by Uyghur workers. Amazon should have done the same since the US company’s supply chain standards specifically exclude forced labor. We can read on these standards that “Amazon suppliers must not use forced labor, whether in the form of slavery, imprisonment, servitude or otherwise”.
A number of countries have imposed sanctions on Xinjiang. This is the case of the United States, which has decided to completely ban imports from Xinjiang since December 2021. Erika Reynoso, a spokesperson for Amazon, tried to defend the company. She explains that Amazon “complies with the laws and regulations of all jurisdictions and expects its suppliers to adhere to supply chain standards. We take allegations of human rights violations seriously, including those related to the use or export of forced labor.”.