Manufacturers, suppliers, and retailers of children’s products across our country are presently facing a great challenge to the survival of their businesses. The new CPSIA regulations which take effect February 10, 2009 are not easy to understand or implement. The regulations are intended to improve the safety of children’s products, which is an extremely important objective. However, the new requirements pose great difficulty and expense for those who sincerely desire to meet the new requirements. (That’s why February 10, 2009 has been referred to by many as “National Bankruptcy Day.”)

Rather than explain the actual CPSIA regulations, which you can read about at www.cpsc.gov, for those of you outside the toy industry who don’t understand what the fuss is all about, the following non-toy analogy might help paint you a picture of the magnitude of the challenge people who create or sell children’s products now face.

Imagine if one day, the government passed a law that said that it is illegal to possess any item of clothing that was made in a specific city in China, with each violation punishable by a fine of $100,000. Imagine further that this new law is expressly made retroactive to cover the clothing already existing in your closet.  

Like most people, you have a closet full of clothes made in China, but none of the labels say what city in China the clothes were manufactured in. The chances of their actually having been manufactured in the specific city in China are literally less than one in a million. But under the new law, unless you can PROVE by very expensive ($500-$2500 per garment) laboratory testing that each of the garments you own were made elsewhere, you will either need to toss all of the clothes in your closet (donating them to charity is also a violation under the new regulations) or take the risk that you will never be “caught” by the government or reported by a disapproving neighbor. 

Up to this point, you have always been a law abiding citizen, and it bothers you to be in illegal possession of anything, but you also cannot afford to go out an buy an entire wardrobe of new clothing—not just for yourself but also for your entire family—or to spend the exorbitant amount of money required to prove that each item of clothing complies with the requirement. 

The deadline is fast approaching. What do you do?? 

And, as if this wasn’t a big enough problem, to make matters worse, imagine that another subsection of the government’s new law also makes it illegal to possess any towels, linens, or bedding unless you can PROVE they were not manufactured on a Monday or Friday. 

That’s the CPSIA in a nutshell. All of the “controversy” surrounding it is not because companies do not want to comply with consumer safety regulations covering children’s products. The problem is great complications and expense in implementation of the new requirements.

We are absolutely concerned about child safety and have no problem with the enactment of new standards that improve the safety of consumer products if the standards are applied going forward (not retroactively), are truly necessary based on genuine risks, and if the benefits to society of the new regulations outweigh the harms they cause.

For more Mission City Press comments re-CPSIA, see http://www.alof.com/consumer_safety.html.