Lisk Feng for NPR
TAIPEI, Taiwan — For four years, Taiwanese social worker and activist Lee Ming-che says he spent about 13 hours a day in a Chinese prison making shoes for the Chinese military, as well as leather work gloves.
Only after his release from prison and return to Taiwan was Lee able to go online and identify the trademark he saw thousands of times a day on each pair of gloves he pieced together. He says the trademark belonged to the U.S. brand Milwaukee Tool.
In a statement, Milwaukee Tool said it “found no evidence of forced labor in the production of our gloves.”
A second former prisoner held in the same prison — Chishan Prison in China’s central Hunan province — filed a lawsuit telling Lee’s and his story this summer, alleging the Wisconsin-based company should have known it was importing goods allegedly made with forced labor.
The case — making claims about a French-owned conglomerate, a Hong Kong corporation and a well-known U.S. brand — epitomizes the complex routes goods can take before they reach a customer, and the difficulty of auditing them.
Both the U.S. and China are major countries that use incarcerated workers and pay them pennies on the dollar, if at all. Legal advocates say prisoners in the U.S. are exploited and pressured to work, because convicts do not enjoy full protection of the country’s employment laws. Prison labor in China is even less regulated.
Prison work in China is also shrouded in secrecy, challenging U.S. companies that are under increasing political pressure to ensure their global supply chains are free of forced labor at a time of increasing U.S. scrutiny of products sourced from China, especially the region of Xinjiang.
In 2022, new U.S. legislation went into effect giving border officials greater authority to seize shipments from Xinjiang suspected of using forced labor.
Last year, a congressional panel found that Chinese online clothing retailers Shein and Temu had a high risk of having used involuntary labor to make clothes and had no minimal compliance measures in place.
“For companies that have relied on very long attenuated supply chains for producing goods in the most cost-effective manner, I think are facing a new reality, and that reality is, you may not be interested in transparency, but transparency is interested in you,” says E. Benjamin Skinner, the founder of Transparentem, a supply chain transparency organization.
A link to a Chinese prison?
The work day in Chishan Prison started at around 6 in the morning and lasted until 6:30 p.m., with two 15-minute breaks for meals, according to the former prisoners.
“If you missed your work quota, you likely would be denied family visitation, the right to buy food at the commissary, or even beaten with electric batons. It was all about making profit for the prison,” Lee remembers.
NPR interviewed another prisoner who had to work on a glove assembly line while incarcerated for several months in Chishan Prison in 2022. This prisoner also remembers the signature lightning bolt of Milwaukee Tool’s trademark clearly, because for several months, he says, he was tasked with gluing a leather patch emblazoned with the logo on what he believes were Milwaukee’s Winter Demolition line of gloves.
“I knew they were Milwaukee gloves because their tags had the company’s phone number and address printed on them,” he says.
NPR is not publishing his name because he lives under police surveillance in China since being released from prison, and speaking to a foreign reporter could further endanger him. The former prisoner is currently suing in U.S. court under a pseudonym to protect his identity.
Taiwanese democracy activist Lee Ming-che speaks with friends before an interview with Agence France-Presse in Taipei on Oct. 5, 2022. Lee returned home in April 2022 after being jailed in China for five years following a national security conviction that further strained already tense relations between Taipei and Beijing.
Sam Yeh/AFP via Getty Images
Sam Yeh/AFP via Getty Images
Unable to take photographs and deterred by prison guards from keeping written notes, Lee says he kept himself sane throughout the long work hours by memorizing as many names as he could on purchase orders of the products he was forced to make. One name stood out for its frequency of appearance: Safety-INXS, a Shanghai-based firm.
Safety-INXS was started in 2022 by an entrepreneur named William Zhao Wei, the son of a Chinese military family. The company first made uniforms and shoes for the Chinese military before branching out into general protective workwear.
In February 2021, dozens of Shanghai’s European business community and high-ranking Chinese industry officials gathered at a hotel to celebrate a major acquisition: a French-owned safety wear and personal protective equipment company called Coverguard had bought a majority stake in Safety-INXS, just as the COVID pandemic was roiling China.
“In the context of COVID-19, this transaction has allowed Coverguard to become a major player in China and in the industry,” Coverguard said in a statement announcing the acquisition. Senior Coverguard executives now occupy top management posts in Safety-INXS, business filings in France and China show.
The lawsuit refers to Safety-INXS and Coverguard, but the plaintiff has not sued them.
Dentressangle, the French investment company that owns Coverguard also was not sued, but it denies using incarcerated labor or other forced labor. “Coverguard takes the topic of forced labor very seriously and firmly condemns any violation of human rights,” said Armand Rigaudy, a company lawyer, in an emailed statement. “Coverguard has conducted 460 production inspections in 2021 and more than 90% of its supply-chain are audited every 3 years to ensure that none of its subsidiaries, suppliers and subcontractors are involved in the exploitation of forced, compulsory or unpaid labor.”
Milwaukee Tool also denies the allegations that it contracts third parties to manufacture its products in Chinese prisons. “Despite rigorous investigations, Milwaukee Tool has found no evidence of forced labor in the production of our gloves,” the company told NPR in a statement, and said it considered the claims to be “without merit.”
Milwaukee Tool also said it had terminated its relationship with INXS: “This decision was made independently from these allegations and reflects our company’s process to innovate and upgrade our glove offerings.”
Safety-INXS’ promotional materials name Milwaukee Tool as a client and say the Chinese company makes gloves for both the U.S. brand as well as its own eponymous line of projective wear. (The materials were first reported by Wisconsin Watch, an investigative news website.) Regulatory filings also state that Safety-INXS was hired to make “performance gloves” for a subsidiary of Milwaukee Tool’s parent company.
Laws against forced labor
Various long-standing U.S. trade laws forbid the import of goods made with incarcerated labor, child labor and forced labor. The challenge is amassing enough firsthand evidence within China to prove forced labor did, or did not, take place.
Thorough audits of Chinese supply chains, especially in the Xinjiang region, are nearly impossible to conduct, say supply chain experts. Xinjiang is a western region in China where authorities have detained and imprisoned thousands of ethnic Uyghur citizens, forcing some of them to work agricultural or manufacturing jobs.
China has detained auditors working on forced labor issues in the country; those risks are in part why most major auditing firms now refuse to inspect factories in Xinjiang. Chinese and U.S. authorities have clashed over letting in U.S. regulators to inspect the financial records of Chinese firms listed on U.S. stock exchanges.
The opaqueness of some Chinese production means companies can have plausible deniability when in importing goods from China.
“If [companies] were able to provide their due diligence, they were able to show that they did every single thing that they could possibly do to make sure forced labor was not used in any point of their supply chain, that is enough to let them out of the hook,” says Sally Alghazali, an international trade lawyer with the Washington, D.C.-based firm Clark Hill.
The lawsuit against Milwaukee Tool alleges the company did not do enough to make sure its products were not tainted with forced labor.
“If it’s true that they didn’t have actual knowledge that there was forced labor in their supply chain, then that can only mean one thing — that their audits were deficient, and under the legal standard, we think that’s enough to hold them liable,” says Times Wang, a U.S. lawyer representing the three plaintiffs.
Meanwhile, the knowledge that their loved ones may be forced to work while imprisoned is “hell,” says Hope Shi. Her husband, the Chinese political activist Cheng Yuan, served a five-year sentence at Chishan Prison, where Lee and the other political prisoner were also held.
For the last three years, Shi worked diligently from the suburbs of Minneapolis to free her husband. Cheng’s sister was able to visit him in jail once a month.
“It’s really hard for her to see the situation of Cheng Yuan, and also the food is limited, not enough nutrition. There’s lots of physical abuse, so he lost weight,” Shi says.
In late July, Cheng finished his sentence in China and was released from prison, but Shi has yet to see him.
Aowen Cao contributed research from Beijing.
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