The recent "anti-inward" storm is the result of a combination of internal and external factors. The internal pressure comes from overcapacity and weak consumption, while the external pressure comes from the European Union's anti-Forced Labor Act.
The EU Anti-Forced Labour Act was adopted on December 12, 2024, with a three-year transition period and full implementation from the end of 2027.
The law explicitly requires that products exported to the EU must not involve "forced labor" at any point in the production process, including working more than eight hours a day or 40 hours a week, even if employees are "voluntarily working overtime." This means that the bill affects not only direct exporters, but also the entire supply chain. If there is overtime in one link of the supply chain, the export of the entire industrial chain will be blocked.
On the surface, the EU bill is out of human rights and labor rights considerations, but in fact, it is to reshape the global industrial division of labor, technological paths and geo-economic patterns, enhance strategic autonomy, and is likely to become the "watershed" of supply chain rules in the 21st century.
If Chinese enterprises lose the huge market of the EU because of the rejection of the bill, it will not only bring economic losses on the paper, but also lose the power of technological upgrading in the long run, leading to a decline in competitiveness, and even be excluded from the global high-end industrial chain.
Therefore, large factories with huge business overseas took the lead, and DJI, Midea, and Haier decisively began to implement the "8-hour, two-day break, no overtime" work system.
Impact on the textile industry
A number of foreign media reports believe that although the bill does not directly mention China, it is clearly aimed at China. The bill will shake the long-term reliance on the "cheap labor" development model, the impact and impact of the most is labor-intensive industries such as textile shoes and clothing.
The textile industry as the world's longest industrial chain extension of the industry, cotton textile products, for example, involving cotton planting, cotton processing, spinning, weaving, clothing production and trade transportation and many other links, the bill will have an impact on each link.
A very typical example, although Xiyin, China's largest cross-border e-commerce company, is only an e-commerce platform and does not directly produce products, its products have been questioned about the existence of forced labor components, which has led to numerous obstacles on the road to listing in the UK.
Therefore, the bill will affect and affect every enterprise in the textile industry chain, and enterprises should plan countermeasures as early as possible.
Zimua Group, a cross-border clothing e-commerce company based in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, is a full activist, by optimizing the work process, the former odd and even days off gradually adjusted to two days off, and in February this year, it announced the implementation of a 4.5 day work system. However, many textile production enterprises have difficulties in reform. At present, most textile factories implement a 12-hour working system, and the labor intensity is much higher than the law. In addition to some enterprises with "brand premium" and technical discourse power, most textile production enterprises are difficult to give up their reliance on ultra-long working hours, because once they give up, it may mean losses and exit the market. Therefore, in this situation, some enterprises producing low value-added products will be replaced by enterprises in low-cost regions such as Southeast Asia and South Asia.
However, the bill is aimed at the world, not only for China, in order to reduce artificial dependence, the bill will accelerate the intelligent development process of the global textile and garment industry to a certain extent.
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