Toy industry responds to CU’s report on recalls

Last month, Consumers Union published a report called “Still Not Safe”  that analyzed recalls made by the Consumer Product Safety Commission during its 2008 fiscal year. In that time, CU said, the "marketplace was besieged by unsafe toys and other products." Carter Keithley, president of the Toy Industry Association, a trade group that represents more than 500 companies that produce and import toys, took issue with some aspects of our report and in a letter expressed the group's "disappointment," claiming that we treated the toy industry "unfairly."

While we respect the opinions expressed by the TIA, we stand by our reporting and believe it  appropriately characterized the state of CPSC recalls. Our report was not aimed at the toy industry but rather at the gaping holes in this country's safety net that allow so many unsafe products to cross our borders, particularly from China. 

Specifically, the TIA took issue with the following findings in our report:

"Recalls were up 19 percent over last year, reaching 563 total recalls announced by the CPSC and involving at least 43 million items. Two-thirds of all products recalled were children’s products including toys, nursery items and clothing."

Of the 563 recalls cited, TIA stated that only 67 were identified by the CPSC as toys, for a total of 12 percent. That’s compared to 84 toy recalls in 2007—a decline of 20 percent. The number of individual toys involved in the recalls declined from about 29 million in 2007 to about 8 million in 2008—a 73 percent reduction.

"More recalls were issued for lead than any other hazard. There were 121 recalls, involving more than 12.2 million toys, pieces of jewelry and other products intended for children."

TIA stated that toys were unfairly lumped together with other children’s products such as jewelry that may not be sold in toy stores. They cited only 26 toy recalls for excess lead, totaling just under a half million units.

In addition, the TIA heralded the success of its own safety initiatives. “The toy industry’s safety testing initiatives have really worked effectively in 2008,” Keithley wrote. We agree that the industry has done a lot to clean up its act, and there’s more work to be done.

The TIA and other organizations are rolling out toy-safety certification programs designed to ensure that toys are manufactured to meet safety standards and to communicate that certification through a mark that would appear on the toys. This is similar to the UL-listed mark that commonly appears on plug-in electrical products. Although not all the details have been worked out by the TIA, it appears that the program will offer a measure of safety assurance above and beyond what will be required by law. Consumers Union has been working with the TIA to ensure that the consumer viewpoint is represented and that the requirements are robust enough to restore the confidence of toy shoppers. We look forward to the program launching later this year—and to continuing our dialogue with the toy industry.—Don Mays

Comments

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Most of these problems are a direct result of decades of incompetent supply-chain management. Legal thought production was controlling the production process and what went into it, and marketing punished production for causing disruptions to the supply chain. Marketing didn’t care who dealt with it as long as the schedule was not disrupted. Eventually, those who didn’t make waves were promoted and those who tried to increase the visibility of the problem were punished. Now people want to punish the Chinese, who never agreed to be responsible for the function in the first place. As a result, the problem everyone thought someone else was dealing with never got dealt with. The CPSIA is nothing but draconian blowback caused by suppliers not engaging in the most minimal amounts of risk management. Outsourcing became a chimera, whereby companies could opt-out of the shabby grubbiness of manufacturing and assign a NPV of zero to the risk of abandoning production controls to others. Now the tears flow as legal realizes it’s getting sucked deeper and deeper into the muck that is more appropriately handled by technical professionals. Too bad those professionals were mostly driven from the field as troublemakers. The CPSC never was and never will be capable of inspecting quality and safety into all the consumer goods consumed in this country. Also, dumping the problem on the Chinese is not a defensible strategy in the American courts since the Chinese government will do whatever it wants, including liberal application of the death penalty, to protect Brand China. Suppliers are delusional if they think their Chinese employees will place their butts on the line at the expense of their own skins. The Chinese refer to the manipulation of testing samples for compliance purposes as “The Golden Sample” and it is often a written requirement in job descriptions for engineers over there. In the USA it’s called “cherry picking” and it invalidates the results to be drawn from product sampling. Most organizations find it cheaper to just pull out the checkbook and settle rather than correct their production processes. Now that the checkbook is going to be much larger, the caterwauling begins.