Overlawyered: Chronicling The High Cost Of Our Legal System

Posts Tagged ‘CPSIA and toys’

The New York Times finally reports on CPSIA

[Bumped Monday a.m. for readers who missed it over the weekend]

The piece appears in the business section of Saturday’s Times, and it’s a perfectly good one as far as it goes. It starts off with a wooden toy maker in Ogunquit, Maine, who estimates that it would cost him $30,000 to secure testing for the 80 items he makes, using such materials as maple, walnut oil and local beeswax. It touches on the strains between large and small manufacturers, nytimesas well as the thrift-store and vintage-book angles. Overall, it’s really not a bad piece of its sort.

Aside from its timing, that is. The Times has now gotten around to covering some of the harm done by this law ten months after the Washington Post and other media had begun reporting the basic outlines of the story; nine and a half months after a furor had built to national proportions, prompting both members of Congress and the CPSC to hurry out supposed clarifications; nine months after hundreds of bloggers were on the case, the law’s effects on thrift stores were making headlines from coast to coast, and the Times’s continuing failure to report on the law’s effects had commentators noting its “weird blind spot” on the issue; eight and a half months after a deeply clueless Times editorial assailed critics of the law who The Times wakes up“foment needless fears that the law could injure smaller enterprises like libraries, resale shops and handmade toy businesses”; seven and a half months after protests by minibike dealers began drawing wide national coverage; seven months after critics rallied on Capitol Hill, and the Washington Post joined in reporting on the law’s dire effects on vintage (pre-1985) kids’ books; and so on to the present.

Okay, so the Times was — well, not a day late and a dollar short, but more like 300 days late and many billions of dollars in overlooked costs short. Still, let’s be grateful: the paper’s news side has now implicitly rebuked the editorial side’s fantastic, ideologically blinkered dismissal of “needless fears that the law could injure smaller enterprises”. And the Times’s belated acknowledgment of the story can serve as permission for other sectors of the media dependent on Times coverage — including some magazines and network news departments — to acknowledge at last the legitimacy of the story and begin according serious attention to the continuing CPSIA calamity. When they do, they will find much to catch up on. (& welcome Handmade Toy Alliance, Chris Fountain readers)

PUBLIC DOMAIN IMAGE from Ethel Everett, illustrator, Nursery Rhymes (1900), courtesy ChildrensLibrary.org.

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CPSIA: StoryBlox closing its doors

PIRG be not proud: “Until recently, I had high hopes that this law would be amended. …ABCblocks We do not mass produce our products, for that our customers love us, and for that congress has made it impossible for us to continue selling our toys without breaking the law.” — Tammy Bowles, founder of the Ohio-based educational plaything line StoryBlox, whose former line can be browsed here. More: Ken at Popehat.

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CPSIA chronicles, September 12

  • On Thursday Henry Waxman’s House Commerce Committee finally held its long-promised hearing on the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act, the first such hearing by a committee with legislative jurisdiction since the calamitous law went into effect in February. TomTomPipersSon2(The Small Business Committee, a panel with no legislative authority over the law, had gone first.) As noted last week, Thursday’s virtually dissent-free event hardly counted as much of a hearing, since Waxman turned down all pleas to allow testimony from actual affected businesses or other critics or victims of the law. Instead he called as his single witness recently appointed CPSC chair Inez Tenenbaum, who hewed closely to the line he (Waxman) wished to hear. A Washington Times editorial is appropriately scathing, and Rick Woldenberg has much more about the committee majority’s finger-in-ears response to the broad outcry over the law. Ranking Republican Joe Barton (R-Texas), who supported the law’s passage, did say that “we have all been inundated” with constituent messages about its ill consequences. The Handmade Toy Alliance has published the statement that Jill Chuckas of Crafty Baby would have made if invited to testify (more).
  • In an August 26 WSJ letter to the editor, Eric Havill of Branchport, N.Y. observes that Congress’s refusal to fix the law “is, if possible, even more irresponsible than the original legislation.”
  • By a unanimous vote, the CPSC recently confirmed that Mattel, the giant toymaker whose many recalls helped touch off the lead-in-toys panic in the first place, has qualified for an exemption from third-party (outside lab) testing of its products under CPSIA, and can instead test in its own in-house labs. Of course, most of Mattel’s competitors are less fortunate and do not operate on a scale that will make such an exemption feasible. The exemption for “firewalled” in-house labs, deemed by one critic a “hall pass,” was something Mattel obtained through intense lobbying back when the law was under consideration. Like the other giant in the business, Hasbro, Mattel actively lobbied for CPSIA’s passage, and even as the law has brought undreamt-of woe to thousands of smaller producers of kids’ products, the two big companies seem to be doing rather well under it. More: Timothy Carney, Washington Examiner; Brad Warbiany, Liberty Papers; Christopher Taylor, Word Around the Net. Other reactions to the exemption: Holly Jahangiri, Rick Woldenberg, Ed Morrissey/Hot Air (“one of the companies that created the problem in the first place has gotten a waiver”), Katherine Mangu-Ward/Reason (“Mattel now has a cost advantage on mandatory testing, and a handy new government-sponsored barrier to entry for its competitors”), Handmade Toy Alliance.

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  • What’s going to replace forbidden phthalates in kids’ products now that CPSIA has banned them? Probably alternative plasticizing chemicals about which we know less, notes Andrew Langer in Roll Call.
  • It’s old news, of course, that the CPSC asserts the power to go after eBay and Craigslist sellers, church bazaars, homeowners who hold yard sales and other sellers of used items that do not comply with CPSIA and other safety standards (although evidence is very sparse that most members of Congress actually realized the law would reach sales of those kinds.) Last month the CPSC saw fit to announce “Resale Roundup”, a new crackdown on secondhand sales. It also revised its book of guidance for resellers, in ways Rick Woldenberg finds less than enlightening. Discussion: Adler/Volokh, Ed Morrissey/Hot Air (“What did we ever do before the CPSIA protected the US through its throngs of federal nannies? How did we ever survive garage sales in the past 233 years?”), Washington Times (“from yard sales to jail cells”), Katherine Mangu-Ward/Reason, John Stossel, Deputy Headmistress/Common Room (“Remember when Congress assured us that the little guys had NOTHING to worry about with the CPSIA because they weren’t going to come after us? They. Lied.”) On the brighter side, McClatchy’s James Rosen quotes spokesperson Scott Wolfson as saying the commission isn’t planning to seek admittance to inspect private homes and garages to enforce the law. So be thankful for small favors.

PUBLIC DOMAIN IMAGES from Ethel Everett, illustrator, Nursery Rhymes (1900), and (illustrator not known) Farm Yard ABC (c. 1880), both courtesy ChildrensLibrary.org.

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CPSIA on Thursday: A fine hearing, with one witness…

YMGcandlestick2A fine hearing/My friends, this is… Rep. Waxman’s plan for a dissent-free panel this Thursday (Sept. 10) is to call as the only witness CPSC chair Inez Tenenbaum, to talk up the merits of the law and her efforts as new steward of the agency. It’s not as if the law’s controversial or anything! The Handmade Toy Alliance wonders whether he’ll get away with it.

PUBLIC DOMAIN IMAGE from Benjamin Cobb, Yankee Mother Goose (Ella Brison, illustrator), courtesy ChildrensLibrary.org.

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CPSIA: miscellaneous reading

Commentaries from various quarters on the dreadful child-safety law:

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  • “Hope and change — and children’s books” [Michael Barone, D.C. Examiner; note however that the law at present does not allow for general enforcement by private lawyers] More on kids’ books: Morton Goldberg, “Inoculated”; Books Bikes Boomsticks (“I don’t think I’ve ever felt quite the quiver of rage I felt” on learning of book angle); Deputy Headmistress (reacting to that post); Grad Student Madness (waiting for the black market to spring up in vintage kids’ books). Esther at Reader’s Loft has drawn up some decision flow charts that may help in determining whether a particular kids’ book needs expensive testing under the law. And “If Your Kid Eats This Book, Everything Will Still Be Okay” — that’s the title of a new book offering child health advice, not a CPSIA critique [ER Stories]
  • “Lead-footed safety issues” [Carter Wood, Washington Times] And let’s hope Washington Post editors take the time to read their own paper [same at ShopFloor]
  • Lenore Skenazy, “The risk of avoiding all risk” [The Post Chronicle; see also Rick Woldenberg]. Related: “More toys from our youth that’d be illegal today” [Doug Ross] And you just know this one’s European, not U.S. [Berg Toys “Moov”]

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  • Suppose Congress had never passed CPSIA — what would be the actual risk that your child would suffer lead poisoning from his dirtbike or other playthings? Essentially zero, as Rick Woldenberg explains in a post from this spring somehow unlinked before now. Indeed, ordinary dirt, which kids have been known to get on their hands and faces from time to time, contains higher concentrations of naturally occurring lead than many of the products whose makers have been hard hit by the law. Likewise, Deputy Headmistress explodes a few myths of CPSIA proponents. And what’s this about infinitesimal residues in children’s vitamins being (no doubt correctly) deemed safe by the federal government?
  • Finally, the valuable site What Is the CPSIA, which is organized as a sort of FAQ to answer common questions about the law, has added substantially to its content in recent weeks and well repays a repeat visit.

PUBLIC DOMAIN IMAGES from Leslie Brooke, illustrator, Oranges and Lemons: A Nursery Rhyme Picture Book (1913), courtesy ChildrensLibrary.org.

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CPSIA: August 14 arrives

Not just our hobby horseOn Friday several key provisions of the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act of 2008 took effect [CPSC release]. The permissible amount of lead in products dropped from 600 parts per million to 300 ppm, ensuring that more zippers, rocks, brass bicycle parts and other harmless items will fail; the new tracking-label mandate went into effect for newly manufactured kids’ goods; and penalties went way up, from a maximum of $8,000 per violation to $100,000 per violation and $15 million overall.

The Associated Press has good coverage. It talks to, among others, Michael Warring, president of American Educational Products, a producer of teaching aids such as globes, maps and animal models based in Fort Collins, Colo. who says he has had no safety recalls or lead problems in his fifteen years of business, but says new testing mandates will cost $2,000 per product item, not counting the costs of tracking labels. The AP story even runs on the New York Times website, thus eroding that paper’s impressive record of shielding its readers from information on the law’s consequences. The WSJ news side quotes new CPSC chairman Inez Tenenbaum as saying the law will be enforced “vigorously”, following similar language in an interview last month (“Tenenbaum said the industry has had adequate time to prepare for the new requirements;” more).

The Washington Times’ editorial gives generous credit to this website for sounding the alarm:

For a year, the Manhattan Institute’s Walter Olson has been compiling horror stories about the Consumer Product Safety and Improvement Act at his Overlawyered blog. Those stories — about what Mr. Olson describes as an “absolutist, not to say fanatical” law — seem to be endless. Yet an out-of-touch Congress continues to ignore the horrible fruits of its handiwork.

The Wall Street Journal editorializes:

Eight bills have since been introduced in the House to remedy the problems [with CPSIA], only to stall in the ideological quicksand of Mr. Waxman’s Energy and Commerce Committee. He has so far failed even to hold hearings.

Greco Woodcrafting has a small toymaker’s perspective.

Deputy Headmistress is irritated by certain blog commenters whose reaction on learning of this law is, “Nobody will enforce it, there has to be a way around it, if you don’t find a way around it you’re too dumb to be in business, it doesn’t mean what it says, they’ll have to take care of it, obviously this wasn’t what the law was for so don’t worry about it, this is just scare-mongering, try this loophole, that other loophole should work…” She also wonders in what sense the law’s consequences should count as truly “unintended”.

Some more background coverage, previously unlinked: Andrew Langer (Institute for Liberty), Roll Call; H. Sterling Burnett and Michael Hand, “Getting the Lead Out Kills Small Businesses, Doesn’t Save Children”, National Center for Policy Analysis #665; Jennifer Upton, Louisville Courier-Journal and Kentucky Kids Consignment Sales. And Hugh Hewitt’s audio interview (auto-play) with Rick Woldenberg comes highly recommended; some print excerpts here [NAM “ShopFloor”].

Public domain image: Grandma’s Graphics, Ruth Mary Hallock.

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CPSIA and compliance: “This can’t be happening”

Good article in Arizona Republic on the difficulties besetting a Scottsdale diaper maker, a Chandler toy maker that has spent $400,000 on compliance efforts with no end in sight, a baby carrier maker in Mesa that expects to go under, and a maker of fabric products in Chandler who says she can’t keep up with the changing requirements. [Chase Purdy, “Companies feel strain of complying with safety law”, July 8]

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CPSIA chronicles, June 18

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  • As noted earlier, the next all-out debacle on the CPSIA front is expected to result from the law’s tracking and labeling regulations, due to take effect August 14, and for which the CPSC has not yet issued guidance, although product makers ordinarily need to resolve crucial issues of manufacturing (as with etching of lot numbers) and packaging at least many months if not longer in advance of sale. Sharon McLoone at CNNMoney had quite a good report a week ago on this latest crisis, which as of this writing has not been followed up much of anywhere else in the press. This continues the pattern in which 1) most key elements of the ongoing CPSIA disaster get good coverage in at least one (sometimes more) major media outlets; 2) the bigger-picture disaster of the law never quite succeeds in breaking out into general coverage as a national story, in large part because 3) the agenda-setting New York Times never consents (even six months into the story!) to give the matter any coverage at all. For more hints on the approaching tracking-label train wreck, see this op-ed by a South Carolina maker of school supplies (“Companies such as ours are now forced to guess about their new legal requirements. … My company may have to change labels hundreds of times a week in our two factories. The investment necessary to handle this new rule alone is crippling.”), or the comments of appliquéd bib maker Laurel Schreiber of Lucy’s Pocket (if the testing doesn’t get her, the tracking labels will), or of New Jersey wooden toy maker John Greco (advised that tracking info would add $3.50 to $5.00 to cost of making $10 handmade toy). And here’s a view from the home furnishings business.
  • No, the menace to pre-1985 children’s books has not gone away, not in the least. Librarians and publishers remain on the edge of their seats awaiting exemptions, clarifications or both. There was some good coverage last month in the Sioux Falls Business Journal (store owner Jenny Cook “had to throw out only 30 books at her store to comply” because most were newer; “Siouxland Libraries has pulled a list of books that were published before 1985”) and at Syracuse.com (“When you think through the implications, it means closing our libraries to children”). And in a sign of possible things to come, ABC-affiliated stations in Seattle and Washington, D.C. have now run sensationalist “toxic books!” attacks on local libraries [Common Room, ShopFloor] More: Winifred Maker, Anderson Valley Post (April).
  • The CPSC’s stay of enforcement didn’t really solve the problem of the ban on dirtbikes and mini-ATVs, and responsible users and dealers end up getting the short end of the stick [Jason Giacchino/ATVSource, Vince Castellanos/ESPN FMX, Motorcycle Industry Council, Charleston (S.C.) Post and Courier]
  • Downtown Los Angeles is home to an estimated 500 toy companies — most of them far smaller than crosstown giant Mattel — and they’re in much distress from the law. [Alexa Hyland, L.A. Business Journal] The L.A. Times, which once gave serious scrutiny to the law’s effects on the apparel and resale sectors, seems (scroll) to be dropping the ball.
  • Those who remain in the kids’-product business after coping with all the other parts of the law will also want to educate themselves about “recall escrows” [Rick Woldenberg]
  • Inez Tenenbaum, named by Obama as new CPSC chair, had her confirmation hearing on Tuesday [ShopFloor and more, Rick Woldenberg]. Nancy Nord earlier stepped down from her role as acting chair.
  • What, what, what could they have been thinking? The American Library Association has actually given its 2009 Public Service Award to California Senator Barbara Boxer, a key architect of some of CPSIA’s provisions; the retroactive phthalates ban she championed has been especially effective in forcing “books-plus” off library shelves, and she has turned a coldly unsympathetic ear to cries of distress over the law (via @melanes). To repeat: what could the ALA have been thinking?

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Public domain images courtesy ChildrensLibrary.org: Walter Crane, illustrator, The Baby’s Aesop (1887).

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Bicycle smashup, of the regulatory sort

bikepostermichelinThe Bicycle Product Suppliers Association has played a role (PDF) in the fight against CPSIA’s (presumably inadvertent) ban on kids’ bicycles; it’s also been dealing with a controversy in the New Jersey legislature over a proposed ban on quick release wheels. But now the legal bills are coming due: “In fact, the expenses associated with these issues could ultimately surpass the association’s entire annual budget of approximately $100,000,” said BPSA president John Nedeau [Bicycle Retailer].

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