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Trump Says U.S. Has Reached Trade Deal With Vietnam

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The president said he had agreed to initial trade terms with Vietnam, the second country to strike a limited deal after Mr. Trump threatened steep tariffs.President Trump said on Wednesday that the United States had reached a trade deal with Vietnam, one that would roll back some of the punishing tariffs he had issued on Vietnamese products in return for that nation’s agreeing to open its market to American goods.The preliminary deal will also indirectly affect China, an important trading partner of Vietnam.“It will be a Great Deal of Cooperation between our two Countries,” Mr. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social announcing the deal.According to Mr. Trump, the deal imposes a 20 percent tariff on all imports from Vietnam and a 40 percent tariff on any “transshipping.”That provision is aimed at addressing Trump administration criticisms that countries like Vietnam have become a channel for Chinese manufacturers to bypass U.S. tariffs and funnel goods into the United States.Which products would fall under the higher tariff rate is unclear. It could refer to goods imported to the United States from Vietnam that actually originated in China. But it could also apply to Vietnamese products that use a certain amount of Chinese parts. The deal could include a lower tariff on goods that are made in Vietnam with fewer Chinese parts and materials, and a higher tariff rate for Vietnamese goods that contain many Chinese components.Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary, wrote on X that “if another country sells their content through products exported by Vietnam to us — they’ll get hit with a 40 percent tariff.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Retailers’ Latest Headache: Shutdowns at Their Vietnamese Suppliers

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    Factories in the country, a major apparel and footwear supplier to the U.S., have been forced by the pandemic to close or operate at reduced capacity, complicating the all-important holiday season.After a bruising 18 months of the pandemic, this fall represented a fresh start for the apparel company Everlane. It was preparing to release a slew of new products, with September marking the beginning of an ambitious marketing campaign around its denim.Instead, Everlane has spent this month scrambling just to get jeans — along with other products like bags and shoes — out of Vietnam, where a surge in coronavirus cases has forced factories to either close or operate at severely reduced capacity with staff living in on-site bubbles.“At this point, we have factories in 100 percent lockdown,” Michael Preysman, Everlane’s chief executive, said in an interview. “Do we fly things over? Do we move things? Do we adjust in the factory? It’s a nonstop game of Tetris.”The crisis in Vietnam, which has grown in recent years to become the second-biggest supplier of apparel and footwear to the United States after China, is the latest curveball to be tossed at the retail industry, which has been battered by the pandemic. Vietnam made it through the first part of the pandemic relatively unscathed, but now the Delta variant of the coronavirus is on a rampage, highlighting the uneven distribution of vaccines globally and the perils that new outbreaks pose to the world’s economy.With the holiday season fast approaching, many American retailers are anticipating delays and shortages of goods, along with higher prices tied to labor and already skyrocketing shipping costs. Everlane said it was facing delays of four to eight weeks, depending on when factories it worked with in Vietnam had closed. Nike cut its sales forecast last week, citing the loss of 10 weeks of production in Vietnam since mid-July and reopenings set to start in phases in October.The apparel company Everlane said that 40 percent of its wares came from Vietnam.Justin Kaneps for The New York Times“We weren’t anticipating a full lockdown,” said Jana Gold, a senior director with Alvarez & Marsal’s consumer and retail group, who has been helping retailers with supply chain issues. “We’re going to continue to see a high demand for goods from highly vaccinated countries or regions, but who are getting the goods from highly unvaccinated countries that could be struggling.”The logjam has put a spotlight on Vietnam’s key role in outfitting American consumers. Many retailers moved their manufacturing to the country from China over the past decade because of rising costs. New tariffs on China instituted under former President Donald J. Trump accelerated the shift.Contract factories in Vietnam manufactured 51 percent of total Nike brand footwear last year. Lululemon and Gap, which also owns Old Navy, have said a third of their merchandise comes from factories in Vietnam. Everlane said the country supplies 40 percent of its wares.As the coronavirus tore across the globe, Vietnam was hailed as a bright spot for its rock-bottom caseload and strong economy. Over 15 months, only 3,000 infections and 15 deaths were reported in the country. But during the summer, the Delta variant erupted among a population that was almost entirely unvaccinated. Now, the caseload has surged past 766,000 and the death toll is nearing 19,000.The densely packed industrial hub of Ho Chi Minh City, the country’s virus epicenter, has experienced a series of increasingly stringent lockdowns, with many factories temporarily closing in July. That paralyzed commercial activity and added stress to a strained global supply chain. Although new cases have started to decline, the government extended the lockdown through the end of September, as it struggles to vaccinate its residents.People waiting to receive their vaccination in Hanoi, Vietnam, this month.Linh Pham/Getty ImagesAt the beginning of September, only 3.3 percent of the country’s population was fully vaccinated, while 15.4 percent had received one shot.The American apparel and footwear industry has asked the Vietnamese government to prioritize shots among factory workers. Executives from roughly 90 companies, including Nike and Fruit of the Loom, asked the Biden administration in a letter in mid-August to accelerate vaccine donations, saying that “​​the health of our industry is directly dependent on the health of Vietnam’s industry.” The group said the industry employed about three million U.S. workers.On a visit to Vietnam last month, Vice President Kamala Harris said the United States would send an additional one million vaccine doses, on top of the five million already donated, along with $23 million in emergency aid and 77 freezers to store the vaccine.“The situation in Vietnam is exactly why we need to be accelerating our efforts to provide donations of vaccines around the world,” said Steve Lamar, president of the American Apparel & Footwear Association, a trade group. Retailers have been setting up vaccination sites at factories to help administer shots once doses are obtained and are trying to keep manufacturing going through “three-in-one place” policy, where workers eat, sleep and work at factories, he said.According to the latest figures from the government, nearly everyone in Ho Chi Minh City has received the first shot.A garment factory in Hanoi in January, before the lockdown.Kham/ReutersJason Chen, chairman and founder of Singtex, a garment factory owner, said last week that the company’s 350-person factory in Binh Duong Province was down to 80 people, who were living on the premises to comply with government restrictions. The factory erected a tent to serve dinner to workers and has been shifting some retail orders to Singtex’s factories in Taiwan. Mr. Chen said he was prepared for the Vietnamese factories to remain closed until November.“This year in the U.S.A., everybody wants to go shopping,” Mr. Chen said. “Some goods cannot be delivered in the right time. So it really will affect the holiday.”He added that administrators at the factory were calling workers who were in lockdown to see if they needed financial and other assistance. But many are struggling.Le Quoc Khanh, 40, who assembles electronic home appliances at Saigon Hi-Tech Park, said the rigidity of the government lockdown had been “very hard” for him and his wife, who have three small children and rent their home in Ho Chi Minh City. His employer is not yet able to bring him back, even though he is vaccinated, and he said he had been forced to borrow money at high interest rates to pay for electricity, diapers and food.“On Sept. 15, when I heard that anyone who had two doses could go to work, my wife and I were so happy that we burst into tears, but now the government says to wait until the end of September,” he said. “My wife and I are so worried. It’s like we are sitting on fire — we really need money for living now.”The pandemic’s continuing impact on crucial supply chains may have a longer-lasting impact on future investment decisions in Vietnam and other emerging economies. Companies choosing where to invest abroad have always evaluated a broad slate of conditions, like taxes, regulatory requirements and labor force availability.“All of a sudden, they have to start thinking about the public health response,” said Chad P. Brown, an economist at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. Huong Le Thu, a senior analyst at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, added: “The Delta wave is just one of the variants. Vietnam, just like other countries, will have to prepare for the long game and potentially more outbreaks even after mass vaccination.”Hoping that restrictions will be eased in October, some factories in Ho Chi Minh City that have been closed since July are preparing to resume production.At the moment, though, American companies are looking outside Vietnam, often returning to Chinese factories that they worked with previously or finding partners in other countries that are not in the middle of a surge.Whether they will have enough time to shift before the holidays is questionable. “September is a bad time to reposition things,” said Gordon Hanson, an economist and urban policy professor at Harvard Kennedy School.Vietnam has been a regular topic on recent earnings calls for retailers, and concerns have probably ballooned as reopenings have been pushed. Adidas, based in Germany, said last month that delays that started with closings in mid-July were among issues that could cost the company more than 500 million euros in sales in the second half of the year.Restoration Hardware cited the shutdowns as a key factor in its decision to push the introduction of a new collection to next spring and to delay fall catalogs. Urban Outfitters said that while it would normally replenish best-selling products during the holiday season, its top concern now was simply getting products into the United States.The outbreak emerged just as the United States appeared to be regaining its economic footing and retailers were seeing a rebound in sales after a difficult 2020.Gihan Amarasiriwardena, right, with his Ministry of Supply co-founder Aman Advani, said the brand had paid about $1.50 per $125 shirt in transportation costs before the pandemic. Now, the cost is nearly $6.Tony Luong for The New York Times“In mid-June, the world looked like a pretty good place, at least in the U.S., and we anticipated this great recovery and here we are,” said Gihan Amarasiriwardena, president and co-founder of Ministry of Supply, a small apparel brand.Production delays aren’t the only problem. Ocean freight costs have soared during the pandemic, ports are crowded and demand for air shipping has jumped so significantly that Ms. Gold of Alvarez & Marsal said some retailers had chartered their own airplanes to transport goods.Since last year, the cost of shipping a container from East Asia to the West Coast of North America has leapt to $20,000 from $4,000, according to the transportation company FreightCo.Mr. Amarasiriwardena said Ministry of Supply had paid about $1.50 in transportation costs for a $125 shirt before the pandemic. Now, the cost is nearly $6 per shirt.Macy’s chief executive, Jeff Gennette, said, “This is the one keeping me up at night,” referring to supply chain issues at ports and in Vietnam. For the company, “it’s a bigger potential problem in the near term than where Covid is right now,” he said.Retailers are already trying to prepare customers. L.L. Bean just added a banner to its website warning customers about holiday shipping delays and shortages and urging early shopping. Stephen Smith, the company’s chief executive, said that the messaging was “unprecedented” for mid-September and that the company normally started talking about holiday orders and shipping cutoffs “deep into October or even November.”Mr. Preysman of Everlane said he anticipated that the supply chain would not rebound to its prepandemic health for several years.“You have to live in a new normal where the stability of 2019 doesn’t come back for three to five years,” he said. “This is going to take a long time to sort out.”Chau Doan More

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    Global Shortages During Coronavirus Reveal Failings of Just in Time Manufacturing

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    Global shortages of many goods reflect the disruption of the pandemic combined with decades of companies limiting their inventories.In the story of how the modern world was constructed, Toyota stands out as the mastermind of a monumental advance in industrial efficiency. The Japanese automaker pioneered so-called Just In Time manufacturing, in which parts are delivered to factories right as they are required, minimizing the need to stockpile them. More

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    ‘One Property at a Time’: A City Tries to Revive Without Gentrifying

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    #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Coronavirus OutbreakliveLatest UpdatesMaps and CasesSee Your Local RiskVaccine InformationWuhan, One Year LaterMarjorie Perry, a contractor, is one of the builders turning an abandoned bank into an apartment building and poets cafe.Credit…Bryan Anselm for The New York Times‘One Property at a Time’: A City Tries to Revive Without GentrifyingNeighborhoods in Newark are beginning to see a flurry of redevelopment, a decade after the city’s downtown gained vogue.Marjorie Perry, a contractor, is one of the builders turning an abandoned bank into an apartment building and poets cafe.Credit…Bryan Anselm for The New York TimesSupported byContinue reading the main storyFeb. 2, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETNEWARK — Construction workers in the South Ward of Newark, one of New Jersey’s most distressed areas, are busy converting a long-abandoned bank into an apartment building and poets cafe.A decrepit mansion in the Central Ward built by a Newark beer baron before the turn of the 20th century is being revamped as a “makerhood,” a first-of-its-kind co-working residential and retail space.Siree Morris, a developer, recently finished erecting six three-bedroom apartments on a formerly vacant lot. Next up: condos made from shipping containers and an affordable-housing complex named for his slain brother, Michael, on the street where they grew up.While the downtown corridors of Newark, a poor industrial city burdened by decades of disinvestment, have been on the rebound for years, much of the rest of the city had been largely left behind.But now even the city’s far-flung residential neighborhoods are in the midst of a slow recovery.The transformation, fueled largely by a push to expand affordable housing and homeownership in this city of renters, is part of a deliberate strategy with an ambitious goal: erasing Newark’s long legacy of blight without pushing out residents, 86 percent of whom are Black or Latino.“It’s coming up the hill, into the inner city,” Arnita Rivers, a Newark resident who runs a variety store and barbershop and also works as a housing contractor, said of redevelopment.Credit…Bryan Anselm for The New York TimesThe challenge of avoiding gentrification while revitalizing a city once synonymous with urban decay is steep.More than a quarter of Newark’s 282,000 residents live in poverty and only 22 percent own homes. Many neighborhoods are still reeling from the 2018 discovery of elevated levels of lead in tap water.Streets are pockmarked by an estimated 2,000 vacant lots, haunting reminders of the middle-class exodus that began before the city erupted in flames during five days of deadly unrest in 1967 and accelerated in the decades that followed.And Newark, New Jersey’s largest city, is now struggling under the catastrophic weight of the coronavirus: One in 342 residents has died from virus-related complications.But there are also signs of hope. Side streets are alive with forklifts and hard hats. Older men gather on corners, sharing stories of days gone by and expressing optimism for even the most overlooked swaths of the city. A breakfast for homegrown entrepreneurs — an extension of monthly “men’s meetings” initiated by Newark’s mayor, Ras J. Baraka — attracted 2,500 just before the start of the pandemic.“You take it one property at a time, one parcel at a time,” said Mr. Morris, 38, who has continued to build throughout the pandemic. “That’s the only way to rebuild a community.”Fifteen miles from the heart of Manhattan, Newark’s downtown commercial district has successfully lured housing developers, a Nike factory store, a Whole Foods Market and the corporate headquarters for Audible, Amazon’s audiobook and podcast service.But in the last five years, more than 3,500 units of affordable housing have also been built or are underway, much of it outside downtown, city records show. Newark sold almost double the number of abandoned parcels at auction in 2020 as it did in 2019, and the average price of land — none of it downtown — was about 30 percent higher. Between 2015 and 2020, major crime, including murder, robbery and assault, plummeted by 40 percent.“This right here is extremely personal to me,” said Siree Morris, a lifelong resident of Newark whose company recently finished construction of two new apartment buildings on a formerly vacant lot.Credit…Bryan Anselm for The New York TimesBig neighborhood projects, like a $100 million expansion of Beth Israel Medical Center, are moving forward alongside smaller ones, including a 51-unit housing complex for seniors and the renovation of three homes that will be sold to residents of public housing using Section 8 vouchers.Even the brutal economic fallout of the pandemic is not expected to erase Newark’s gains.“They took advantage of the growth in downtown, and the strength, and they put effort into all of the wards,” said Doug Goldmacher, an analyst with Moody’s Investors Service, a financial rating agency.The Coronavirus Outbreak More

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    Nike and Coca-Cola Lobby Against Xinjiang Forced Labor Bill

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    WASHINGTON — Nike and Coca-Cola are among the major companies and business groups lobbying Congress to weaken a bill that would ban imported goods made with forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region, according to congressional staff members and other people familiar with the matter, as well as lobbying records that show vast spending on the legislation.The bill, which would prohibit broad categories of certain goods made by persecuted Muslim minorities in an effort to crack down on human rights abuses, has gained bipartisan support, passing the House in September by a margin of 406 to 3. Congressional aides say it has the backing to pass the Senate, and could be signed into law by either the Trump administration or the incoming Biden administration.But the legislation, called the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, has become the target of multinational companies including Apple whose supply chains touch the far western Xinjiang region, as well as of business groups including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Lobbyists have fought to water down some of its provisions, arguing that while they strongly condemn forced labor and current atrocities in Xinjiang, the act’s ambitious requirements could wreak havoc on supply chains that are deeply embedded in China.Xinjiang produces vast amounts of raw materials like cotton, coal, sugar, tomatoes and polysilicon, and supplies workers for China’s apparel and footwear factories. Human rights groups and news reports have linked many multinational companies to suppliers there, including tying Coca-Cola to sugar sourced from Xinjiang, and documenting Uighur workers in a factory in Qingdao that makes Nike shoes.In a report issued in March, the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, a bipartisan group of lawmakers, listed Nike and Coca-Cola as companies suspected of ties to forced labor in Xinjiang, alongside Adidas, Calvin Klein, Campbell Soup Company, Costco, H&M, Patagonia, Tommy Hilfiger and others.In a statement, Coca-Cola said that it “strictly prohibits any type of forced labor in our supply chain” and uses third-party auditors to closely monitor its suppliers. It also said that the COFCO Tunhe facility in Xinjiang, which supplies sugar to a local bottling facility and had been linked to allegations of forced labor by The Wall Street Journal and Chinese-language news media, “successfully completed an audit in 2019.”Greg Rossiter, the director of global communications at Nike, said the company “did not lobby against” the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act but instead had “constructive discussions” with congressional staff aides aimed at eliminating forced labor and protecting human rights.Asked about the allegations of forced labor, Nike referred to a statement in March in which it said that it did not source products from Xinjiang and that it had confirmed that its suppliers were not using textiles or yarn from the region.Nike said that the Qingdao factory had stopped hiring new workers from Xinjiang in 2019, and that an independent audit confirmed there were no longer employees from there at the facility. (According to a report published in March by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute that cited state media, the factory employed around 800 Uighur workers at the end of 2019 and produced more than seven million pairs of shoes for Nike each year.)China’s vast campaign of suppressing and forcibly assimilating Uighurs and other minorities in Xinjiang has attracted the scorn of politicians and consumers around the world.But for many companies, fully investigating and eliminating any potential ties to forced labor there has been difficult, given the opacity of Chinese supply chains and the limited access of auditors to a region where the Chinese government tightly restricts people’s movements.The Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act would require companies sending goods to the United States to scrutinize those supply chains, or perhaps abandon Chinese suppliers altogether. It would impose high standards, barring imports of goods made “in whole or in part” in Xinjiang unless companies prove to customs officials that their products were not made with forced labor.The bill also targets so-called poverty alleviation and pairing programs that ship Muslims from impoverished areas to work in factories elsewhere, which human rights groups say are often coercive. Companies would be required to disclose information on their ties to Xinjiang to the Securities and Exchange Commission.Richard A. Mojica, a lawyer at Miller & Chevalier, said that for many companies, convincing the authorities that they have no involvement with forced labor could take months. Firms were already responding by trying to find sources for products outside Xinjiang, he said.“Rebutting a presumption of forced labor is going to be a very challenging endeavor,” he said.Companies and groups lobbying on the bill have been pushing for various revisions, including easing disclosure requirements, people familiar with the conversations said.Apple, which has extensive business ties to China, has also lobbied to limit some provisions of the bill, said two congressional staff members and another person familiar with the matter.Disclosure forms show that Apple paid Fierce Government Relations, a firm led by former staff aides to Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and President George W. Bush, $90,000 to lobby on issues including Xinjiang-related legislation in the third quarter. Apple’s lobbying was previously reported by The Washington Post.Apple also paid outside firms this year to lobby on another bill, the Uyghur Forced Labor Disclosure Act of 2020.Apple disputed the claim that it had tried to weaken the legislation, saying it supported efforts to strengthen American regulations and believes the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act should become law.According to a document viewed by The New York Times, Apple’s suggested edits to the bill included extending some deadlines for compliance, releasing certain information about supply chains to congressional committees rather than to the public, and requiring Chinese entities to be “designated by the United States government” as helping to surveil or detain Muslim minority groups in Xinjiang.In its March report, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute identified Apple and Nike among 82 companies that potentially benefited, directly or indirectly, from abusive labor transfer programs tied to Xinjiang.That report said that O-Film Technology, a contractor for Apple, Microsoft, Google and other companies, received at least 700 Uighur workers in a program that was expected to “gradually alter their ideology.” It tied other Apple suppliers, including Foxconn Technology, to similar employment programs.Apple said in a statement that it had the strongest supplier code of conduct in its industry and that it regularly assessed suppliers, including with surprise audits.“Looking for the presence of forced labor is part of every supplier assessment we conduct and any violations of our policies carry immediate consequences, including business termination,” the statement said. “Earlier this year, we conducted a detailed investigation with our suppliers in China and found no evidence of forced labor on Apple production lines and we are continuing to monitor this closely.”Lobbying disclosures show that companies have spent heavily to sway Congress on Xinjiang-related legislation, though they reveal nothing about their specific requests.In the first three quarters of 2020, Nike spent $920,000 on in-house lobbying of Congress and other federal agencies. Disclosures do not break down expenditures by topic, but show Nike lobbied on matters including physical education grants, taxes and climate change, as well as the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act.Nike also paid outside firms like Cornerstone Government Affairs, Ogilvy, Capitol Counsel, GrayRobinson, American Continental Group, DiNino Associates and Empire Consulting Group more than $400,000 this year to lobby on issues including the act.Mr. Rossiter said that Nike had these firms on retainer long before the Xinjiang legislation was introduced, and that the company actively worked with lobbying firms to engage Congress on a variety of subjects it cares about.Coca-Cola has also invested heavily, spending $4.68 million in the first three quarters of 2020 on in-house lobbying and hiring Empire Consulting Group and Sidley Austin to lobby on issues including the act.Coca-Cola said in a statement that it complies with all laws associated with its political activities and has “adopted best-in-class disclosures practices.”The U.S. Chamber of Commerce declined to comment on lobbying, instead providing a letter it sent to Congress in November with seven other industry groups. The letter said the groups had long been working to combat forced labor, and urged the government to take a comprehensive approach that would mobilize the administration, Congress and foreign governments to address the problem, in addition to industry. More