Yeah, just bad reporting.

"Apple lobbyists are trying to weaken a bill aimed at preventing forced labor in China, according to two congressional staffers familiar with the matter, highlighting the clash between its business imperatives and its official stance on human rights."

1) The US legislators could not care less about "forced labor" in China (or even in the US for that matter, e.g. penal labor). Same way they don't care when it is their allies doing it (or worse things). It's all about the trade and dominance war with China.

2) Apple and the other companies involved don't care about forced labor either (if they could legally and without media repurcusion use it, they would). But they also don't need and don't seek forced labor. Good old capitalist low wage labor is good enough for them. So it's not like they try to defend China's forced labor because they benefit for it.

3) What Apple and the other companies have is multiple suppliers all over China, including that area. Most of them (if not all) have little or nothing to do with forced labor. But because the law aims to hurt China and not to stop forced labor, it doesn't care about little details, but uses blunt force and a wide net.

4) Understandingly (from a business/logistics perspective) Apple, Google, and co, can't just drop/replace suppliers at the drop of a hat. So they ask for more time for check, and a better look at which suppliers are actually problematic to be added to the bill. So "weaken the provisions" is actually "make the law more accurate and fairer", but they won't say that.

Then the mix of propaganda for foreign policy (as if those legislators care), hypocrisy, business interests (from Apple and co) and extremely bad reporting for clickbait and patriotic reasons, then turns into:

"Apple lobbies in favor of force labor".

It's as if some companies wanted to continue to use some useful drug medically, and e.g. tried to "weaken the provisions" of an strict anti-drug law that forbade it without nuance, and the headlines were like "Company X lobbies in favor of heroin".

I agree, this is a deal that should be between governments, this is just an attempt of the US government to push responsibility to companies rather than actually acting against the Chinese government to end these labor camps. Whether tariffs or whatever. Few companies have the ability to follow every link of the supply chain for corruption. Most small to mid size to just find a distributer and buy what they need, they don't have the ability or authority to send in a small army of auditers, that the CCP isn't going to allow anyway.