Garment factory in Bangladesh. Photo Credit: Fahad Faisal, Wikipedia Commons
June 9, 2026
By Shiamak Ali
The US is finding ways to exploit Bangladesh after the International Emergency Economic Powers Act was thrown out by the judiciary.
The Trump Administration’s emergency tariff route may have failed in court, but Washington’s pressure campaign against Bangladesh has simply found another lever.
After the U.S. Supreme Court weakened the legal basis of Trump’s blanket tariff offensive under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, one might have expected Dhaka to gain breathing room. The pressure that had been used to justify the hurried U.S.-Bangladesh Agreement on Reciprocal Trade should have lost much of its force. But Washington is moving quickly to deny Dhaka that space.
Forced Labour Law
Washington is now reaching for Section 301, using alleged forced-labour enforcement failures to place Bangladesh and 59 other economies under a fresh tariff threat of an additional 10 to 12.5 percent.
Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974 gives Washington a broad unilateral trade weapon. It allows the United States Trade Representative to investigate foreign acts, policies or practices deemed unjustifiable, unreasonable or discriminatory, and then impose retaliatory measures if they are said to burden American commerce.
In the past, that language has been used against intellectual property violations, technology-transfer practices and unfair competition. It is now being turned toward alleged forced-labour enforcement failures.
Geopolitical Extraction
The unfairness, however, lies in the design. The problem is not simply that Section 301 is stronger than IEEPA. It is that a labour-rights vocabulary is being converted into a mechanism of geopolitical extraction: forced labour supplies the moral language, Section 301 supplies the weapon, and Bangladesh is left to negotiate under threat once again.
IEEPA was blunt, theatrical and legally vulnerable. Section 301 is more disciplined. It allows the United States to investigate a foreign practice, define the injury to American commerce, judge the adequacy of the response and then impose punishment. In other words, Washington does not need a neutral tribunal to validate the allegation before turning it into economic pressure. It can act as investigator, prosecutor and executioner within its own trade-law machinery.
For Bangladesh, the timing is impossible to treat as coincidence. The reciprocal trade agreement was dubiously signed on 9 February 2026, in the waning days of the Muhammad Yunus-led interim administration and on the eve of a national election, by Commerce Adviser Sheikh Bashir Uddin and National Security Adviser Khalilur Rahman. It was sold as a defensive necessity: Bangladesh, we were told, had to accept painful concessions to protect access to the American market. But the tariff panic that helped create that urgency has since been judicially discredited. Even then, no serious attempt has been made across the political spectrum to reopen the agreement, despite visible public backlash.
Section 301 now performs the function IEEPA can no longer reliably perform. Bangladesh is not being accused, in any serious evidentiary sense, of running an export economy built on forced labour. The more useful accusation is administrative: that it lacks an enforcement architecture acceptable to Washington. That is a broader, softer and more convenient charge. It allows labour rights to become a tariff trigger without requiring a clean demonstration that Bangladesh’s garment sector is structurally dependent on coerced work.
None of this requires pretending that Bangladesh’s labour economy is clean. It is not. Poverty, informality, weak inspection capacity and household survival pressures remain real. But there is a difference between acknowledging developmental weakness and allowing that weakness to be weaponised by a larger power.
Bangladesh cannot be asked to cure poverty at gunpoint. Nor can a society where early work often emerges from family desperation be transformed overnight into an American compliance model because Washington has discovered a new statutory lever.
The forced-labour language supplies moral cover for a trade pressure campaign whose timing is unquestionably political and deeply coercive. As the IEEPA route collapses, Section 301 arrives to preserve leverage.
As Bangladesh is pushed to defend its labour architecture, the wider reciprocal trade agreement continues to bind the country through cotton-linked market access, sanctions alignment, digital rules and restrictions on third-country cooperation. As labour provides the vocabulary and tariffs provide the discipline, dependency is the bargain Bangladesh is being pushed to accept.
Supply Chain Alignment
This is where the cotton trap becomes visible and exposes what the forced-labour language conceals. Washington is not only asking Bangladesh to strengthen enforcement. It is tying tariff relief to supply-chain alignment. Under the framework announced between the two governments, certain Bangladeshi textile and apparel exports may receive zero reciprocal tariff treatment, but the eligible volume is to be determined by reference to Bangladesh’s purchase of U.S. textile exports, including American cotton and man-made fibre inputs.
The USDA’s Great American Cotton Plan removes any remaining ambiguity. Bangladesh is being positioned as a market for American cotton at a time when Washington is trying to revitalise its own cotton economy. For a country whose apparel sector remains its main export artery, this is not a minor sourcing preference. A mechanism that links access to the American market with the purchase of American inputs gives Washington leverage over the supply chain on which Bangladesh’s industrial economy depends. Cotton stops being a commodity and becomes a point of discipline.
That is why the forced-labour argument cannot be separated from the commercial architecture around it. Bangladesh is being accused of weak labour enforcement while being pulled toward a structure that serves U.S. cotton and textile interests. If the concern were merely humanitarian, the emphasis would fall on worker protection, inspection capacity, social safeguards and buyer responsibility. Instead, tariff relief is being routed through American inputs. The remedy begins to resemble market capture.
Colonial Model
Nor is the historical echo accidental. Dr.Moshahida Sultana Ritu, who has written extensively on trade, labour and development, sharpens the point through a colonial comparison. The logic recalls the colonial cotton economy, where British rule helped turn India from a major textile producer into a market for British finished cloth, while colonial raw-material networks fed Britain’s industrial machine.
Bangladesh is not being colonised in the old imperial sense. But the structure is familiar: the stronger market offers access, then conditions that access on the weaker economy reorganising itself around the stronger power’s needs.
Bangladesh’s answer to the Section 301 tariff threat cannot be denial. That would be too simple for Washington to dismiss. Nor can it be panic compliance, because that would simply teach the United States that each new tariff lever produces another concession.
The way out is narrower and harder: Bangladesh must remove the forced-labour pretext without accepting the sourcing trap. Dhaka should announce a clear prohibition on the import of goods made with forced labour, backed by customs screening, importer due diligence, supplier documentation and phased enforcement.
But that system must be built under Bangladeshi law and internationally recognised standards, not through automatic adoption of Washington’s geopolitical risk map—that distinction is essential.
If every country, region or supplier labelled risky by the United States becomes unusable for Bangladesh, then forced-labour compliance becomes a foreign sourcing policy written in Washington. China is the obvious example. Once Chinese inputs are treated as legally toxic or commercially dangerous, American cotton begins to appear as the “safe” route by design. No formal instruction is needed. The choice is narrowed before the exporter even reaches the table.
Dhaka should therefore separate labour reform from cotton dependency. It can cooperate on supply-chain transparency without allowing tariff relief to be tied to American textile inputs. It can strengthen inspection and enforcement without surrendering the right to source cotton, yarn, fabric or machinery from wherever commercial logic demands.
If a supplier is genuinely implicated in forced labour, Bangladesh can investigate and act. But it should not accept a system where Washington’s strategic rivalries become Bangladesh’s procurement rules.
Nor is the historical echo accidental. Dr.Moshahida Sultana Ritu, who has written extensively on trade, labour and development, sharpens the point through a colonial comparison. The logic recalls the colonial cotton economy, where British rule helped turn India from a major textile producer into a market for British finished cloth, while colonial raw-material networks fed Britain’s industrial machine.
Bangladesh is not being colonised in the old imperial sense. But the structure is familiar: the stronger market offers access, then conditions that access on the weaker economy reorganising itself around the stronger power’s needs.
Bangladesh’s answer to the Section 301 tariff threat cannot be denial. That would be too simple for Washington to dismiss. Nor can it be panic compliance, because that would simply teach the United States that each new tariff lever produces another concession.
The way out is narrower and harder: Bangladesh must remove the forced-labour pretext without accepting the sourcing trap. Dhaka should announce a clear prohibition on the import of goods made with forced labour, backed by customs screening, importer due diligence, supplier documentation and phased enforcement.
But that system must be built under Bangladeshi law and internationally recognised standards, not through automatic adoption of Washington’s geopolitical risk map—that distinction is essential.
If every country, region or supplier labelled risky by the United States becomes unusable for Bangladesh, then forced-labour compliance becomes a foreign sourcing policy written in Washington. China is the obvious example. Once Chinese inputs are treated as legally toxic or commercially dangerous, American cotton begins to appear as the “safe” route by design. No formal instruction is needed. The choice is narrowed before the exporter even reaches the table.
Dhaka should therefore separate labour reform from cotton dependency. It can cooperate on supply-chain transparency without allowing tariff relief to be tied to American textile inputs. It can strengthen inspection and enforcement without surrendering the right to source cotton, yarn, fabric or machinery from wherever commercial logic demands.
If a supplier is genuinely implicated in forced labour, Bangladesh can investigate and act. But it should not accept a system where Washington’s strategic rivalries become Bangladesh’s procurement rules.
Not a Bilateral Problem
Bangladesh should also stop treating this as a bilateral problem to be solved alone. Sixty economies have been placed under the same Section 301 cloud. Some are contesting the premise; others are seeking exemptions, deferrals or negotiated carve-outs. Dhaka should coordinate with affected countries and push the argument collectively: forced-labour enforcement may be legitimate, but unilateral tariff punishment cannot become a mechanism for rewriting global supply chains around American priorities.
The same pressure should be applied through buyers. Major U.S. retailers do not want sudden tariff shocks, disrupted sourcing or higher consumer prices. If Bangladesh presents a credible compliance roadmap, those buyers can become a counterweight in Washington.
The message should be simple: Bangladesh will reform where reform is required, but it will not accept permanent tariff intimidation as the price of access to the American market.
About Shiamak Ali
Shiamak Ali is a young researcher on South Asia working for a Chinese think tank.
View all posts by Shiamak Ali →
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