Product safety: the impossible dream

I'm not sure how anybody can continue to feign surprise at the blatant ownership of our government by special interests, but sometimes the reality of it reaches out and kicks us in the face. Again.

Consider the effort to overhaul product safety, for instance. Seems like a noble enough effort, and one long overdue. After all, hardly a day goes by when you don't hear about a metal spike in some kid's toy, or Chernobyl-in-a-can distributed en masse to the populace, courtesy foreign and domestic companies with no concept of quality control.

After public outcry reached a fever pitch, Congress woke up from its lazy slumber and noticed a golden opportunity to actually fix something. So lawmakers came up with a crazy plan: pass some legislation! To wit:

WASHINGTON (AP) — Responding to a wave of defective toys and other goods, the Senate approved a measure on Thursday that would overhaul the country’s consumer product laws and strengthen the beleaguered safety agency that oversees the market­place.

Besides increasing the staff and budget of the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the legislation would create a public database of complaints about products and empower state prosecutors to act if they think the federal government is not doing enough to protect consumers.

If the bill becomes law, it would be the first major consumer product legislation in 18 years, enacted as federal regulators struggle to cope with the explosive growth of foreign imports, particularly from countries with few significant safety standards.

The Senate bill, which was supported by consumer groups, was adopted 79-13. It now heads to a conference committee to be reconciled with a more modest measure that was endorsed by the White House and major manufacturers and was unanimously passed in December by the House.

Of course, in the realm of special interest lobbying, Congress getting an insane notion such as passing legislation is generally bad fucking news. So lobbyists sprung into action and called an old friend: the White House!

An administration statement this week criticized the Senate bill and embraced the House bill, saying it “takes positive steps toward further ensuring that Americans are protected from unsafe products.” Consumer groups say the House measure is a sop to the manufacturing industry.

...

The White House announced a lengthy list of objections to the Senate legislation. It criticized one provision that would give an enforcement role to state prosecutors and another that would extend whistle-blower protections to employees who disclose safety violations.

The Bush administration also opposed provisions that would create a public database of consumer safety complaints and that would require laboratories that test certain children’s products for safety to be independent and privately owned.

“These provisions threaten to burden American consumers and industry in unproductive ways, and may actually harm a well-functioning product safety system,” the administration statement said. The statement did not threaten a veto.

Wait, wait. A "well-functioning product safety system"? Did I sustain a massive head injury in the last week and hallucinate the latest tsunami of recalls?

The knee-jerk (and misleading) reaction to recalls is to assume that they are expressly the fault of foreign countries, and therefore it's those damn foreigners who should tighten product safety, not the enterprising and benevolent manufacturing sector here in the USA. It's a good talking point, but completely untrue, as The Times points out:

Chinese manufacturers have produced many of the toys that have been recalled in recent years for safety flaws, but most of those flaws did not come from China but from companies in the US and other developed nations.

Problems with lead paint (a manufacturing flaw) aside, most errors that lead to recalls, not just of toys but of all kinds of consumer goods, are design mistakes and are the responsibility of the companies that dream up the products in the first place.

And these mistakes are preventable: our study of US toy recalls indicates that companies can do a much better job of learning to avoid them. The trick is to treat potential errors just as seriously as the ones that have already been made and to learn from both types. Even companies that have never been responsible for harmful product flaws should be diligent about prevention because recalls can happen to any consumer-product maker.

It’s understandable that China has figured prominently in the recent public discussion of toy recalls. After all, about 80% of the toys recalled in the US in 2006 were manufactured there. But 68% of those 25 recalls were due to design flaws.

The US Consumer Product Safety Commission maintains a public list of the top consumer hazards and reasons for recalls. Flawed design — sharp edges, long strings and small detachable parts, for example — has been the cause of three-quarters of all US toy recalls since 1988.

What’s more, the same causes repeat year after year, even as the number of toys that have been taken off the market because of safety concerns has steadily increased.

Our research, which involved a study of about 600 US toy recalls from 1988 through 2007, along with interviews of design engineers, manufacturing executives and consumer advocates, suggests several steps companies can take to reduce design flaws.

Yes, that's right: America has a problem, too. And it will only continue until the government steps up and informs manufacturers that they will pay a dear price if they continue to sell products that kill us.