I am “Busting my Buffers” over the Thomas Recall
My son Alexander loves Thomas the Tank Engine. A typical Thomas the Tank Engine story is a little morality play about hubris. Over the last 3 years my husband and I, as well as many of our friends, have bought him numerous wooden railway toys, DVDs etc. On June 13th, R2C Corp announced a recall of 26 models of Thomas the Tank Engine & Friends wooden railway toys. The recall concerns approximately 1.5 million toys sold between January 2005 and June 2007. The toys are being recalled because surface paints on the recalled products contain lead. Lead is toxic if ingested by young children – and who of you who has children have not seen the most impossible things go in their mouths?
The toy trains are manufactured in China, and one of the factories that makes them has been using lead paint for the last couple of years. The company that owns the Thomas brand, HIT Entertainment, holds the rights to a number of popular characters, including Barney and Bob the Builder, and then licenses the toy manufacturing to companies like RC2. RC2 also makes toys for giants like Disney, Nickelodeon and Sesame Street.
HIT has otherwise acted as if it has nothing to do with the situation and has expressed no regrets publicly. I say as a consumer that we let HIT know that it cannot go without punishment for ducking responsibility for the safety of its products.
This is a story about the realities of offshoring. Over the last two decades or so, American companies have generally followed a bilateral outsourcing strategy of moving as much of their manufacturing as possible to places where salaries are lower than in the U.S and secondly, the companies have distanced themselves from their overseas production. They usually don’t own the factories and refuse to say much about them. I read an interesting article in the New York Times by Leonhardt, who suggests that for many businesses, outsourcing has simply grown too big to stay behind the curtain. What happens in Chinese factories determines how good — how reliable and how safe — many products are. So there is no way for executives to distance themselves from China without also distancing themselves from their own products.
I am asking the help of our government to play a role here by inspecting more of the items coming into this country. This is not the first recall or quality issue we have heard of recently. What do you think? I can’t do it all!
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3 comments:
Hi Vicki, congratulations on the new blog.
Inspecting everything that arrives from China would be impossible, wouldn't it? I think the answer needs to be increased emphasis on product safety in China itself. Officials there seem to be moving in that direction.
Don Loepp
Plastics News
Many of the problems uncovered recently are the result of either cost cutting or lacking of safty awareness at Chinese manufacturers.
Other than import inspection & safety emphasis at the source of origin as part of solutions, It is egaully important in holding importers or marketers liable for not practicing "Responsible Care" in distributing goods.
Let's admit something openly.
You get what you pay for
Producing in China is low cost. But it's not just due to lower direct labor wages. It's also due to less regulation of all kinds. It's due to a ''whatever we can get away with'' attitude. The lead paint on kid's toys is not, unfortunately, an anomaly. The experiences with tainted food, pet food, etc. should have proved that, as are the revelations of out-and-out slavery. You expect decent behavior in a nation ruled by thugs who murdered upwards of 67 million of its own citizens? I understand the economics very well. I also understand that I am ashamed that we even do business with genocidal mass murderers.
It's not, as a poster suggested, a lack of safety awareness. It's that they really don't care, and never will.
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