Consumers’ Safety and Rights
You may not have noticed, but last week, we narrowly avoided a serious blow to consumers’ safety and rights. The Consumer Product Safety Commission, the federal agency that regulates product safety and enforces recalls of unsafe products, has been operating with an acting chairwoman for almost a year. The Bush Administration’s response? Nominating a manufacturing industry lobbyist as the new chair! Congressional Democrats squelched that idea after they found out that the nominee, Michael Baroody, was due for a $150,000 severance package from the National Association of Manufacturers.
Putting a manufacturers’ lobbyist in charge of consumer protection is nearly a textbook example of having the fox guard the henhouse. Even ignoring the obvious conflict of interests created by a six-figure payoff from the manufacturers Baroody would have regulated, his past track record raises serious doubts about whether he would have kept consumers’ best interests in mind. He’s lobbied for softer regulations -- and they’re already quite favorable to industry -- for 17 years.
The CPSC’s Web page says unsafe products cost our economy $700 billion a year. More importantly, they kill and injure thousands of Americans each year; the commission’s study on toy injuries alone shows 202,300 injuries and 20 deaths caused by unsafe toys in 2005. The report doesn’t say whether the toys were properly manufactured and labeled, but we know that 100 percent of those children’s injuries and deaths were preventable. In our own products liability practice, we’ve seen one client who was permanently brain damaged by a defective product; another client, who was only 21, lost the sight in one eye.
