Amazon Suppliers Tied to Forced Labor in Xinjiang

Amazon’s public list of suppliers, which produce Amazon devices and goods for Amazon’s private brands, includes five companies that have been linked directly or indirectly to forced labor of ethnic minorities from China’s Xinjiang region, TTP found. [...]

Three Amazon suppliers are reported to have used forced labor directly: Luxshare Precision Industry, AcBel Polytech, and Lens Technology. Another two, GoerTek and Hefei BOE Optoelectronics, are themselves supplied by factories that have been implicated in forced labor.

An additional noteworthy finding: Amazon continued to include one company—Esquel Group—on its supplier list for more than a year after the U.S. government imposed sanctions on an Esquel subsidiary for involvement in forced labor in China. [...]

On its supplier list, Amazon lists two wholly owned subsidiaries of the Chinese company Luxshare Precision: Dongguan Luxshare Precision Industry and Shenzhen Luxshare Electro Acoustic Technology Co., Ltd. In a May 2021 bombshell report about Apple’s use of suppliers linked to forced labor, The Information, citing Chinese sources, reported that Luxshare received “as many as hundreds” of Xinjiang workers between 2017 and 2020.

Amazon’s supplier list also includes a subsidiary of AcBel Polytech, a Taiwan-based company. The Information found video evidence of AcBel’s use of Xinjiang labor at its factory in Wuhan, China, in late 2018 or early 2019. (TTP contributed to The Information’s investigation.) [...]

Amazon also uses Lens Technology Changsha Co., Ltd.—a subsidiary of Lens Technology—as a supplier. Evidence discovered by TTP, and shared with The Washington Post for a report in December 2020, indicates that Lens Tech has used thousands of Uyghur workers from Xinjiang. [...]

In a March 2020 a report titled, “Uyghurs for Sale,” the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) showed that a subsidiary of Amazon supplier Dongguan Yidong Electronic Co. Ltd. received transferred Uyghur workers. Amazon dropped the company from its supplier list later that same year. But Amazon has continued to use GoerTek, another Chinese firm that, according to ASPI, is supplied by Dongguan Yidong. That means Amazon is linked through an intermediary supplier to a company involved in forced labor in China.

ASPI also found that Hefei Highbroad Advanced Material Co., a supplier of electronic displays, employed forced Uyghur labor. One of Amazon’s current suppliers, Hefei BOE Optoelectronics Technology Co., is itself supplied by Hefei Highbroad, according to Chinese corporate records.

Then there’s the issue of Esquel, a major textiles manufacturer with extensive operations in Xinjiang. The Commerce Department imposed sanctions on an Esquel subsidiary in July 2020 over its involvement in forced labor in China. But for more than a year afterward, Amazon continued to list two other Esquel subsidiaries, one in China and one in Vietnam, on its supplier list. The subsidiaries were present on the supplier list as recently as December 2021, but have since been removed by Amazon. (TTP has detailed Apple’s use of Esquel to make T-shirts for its retail staff following the sanctions.) [...]