Bruce and I have worked together during the pre-publishing stage of his book. As a company listed in his upcoming book it seemed appropriate to let him know what is coming for many manufacturers of children’s products with regards to cpsia. He has asked me to post his reply to our blog and to let folks know that he is more than happy to correspond about this issue. His name is linked directly to his email address below.

“I am the author of a book entitled, Made Here, Baby! (Amacom Books-NYC), due out in late April 2009. Our Web site, www.madeherebaby.com should be “live” at the beginning of March. For more than two years, I have located and interviewed American manufacturing companies making all kinds of children’s products. The 1st edition of the book will detail 417 companies. There are many more companies and I hope to get to them as quickly as I can for a future edition. This is an extremely complex issue and I believe the answers lie somewhere in the middle. I cannot condemn our government regulators for wanting to impose tough new laws. On the other hand, American-manufacturing companies that have been safely handcrafting children’s toys for decades upon decades, should not be lumped in with multi-nationals who have knelt at the feet of the bottom-line and have cut corners to bring us hazardous toys and many other products. Make no mistake about it; a tour of the CPSC Web site will show that the vast majority of products that have been recalled have been imports. I am not “China-bashing,” nor am I flag waving, I am just stating a fact. Should there be testing of children’s toys? Of course! But it is not necessary to use a 500 pound sledge hammer in order to nail in a tack. I have interviewed American craftspeople, for example, who will go out in the woods on their farms to select an aged piece of fruit wood, then have incredible skill to turn it into an amazing toy. They will then polish and then rub that wood with a safe edible oil. The toys are more like works of art than anything else. Yet children love them. Parents and grandparents love them. These craftspeople are extremely aware of the “burden” on their shoulders to make safe toys — after all, they are your neighbors. Compare that to a children’s costume necklace made overseas using cheap labor often under brutal conditions. Many of these pieces of jewelry present choking hazards and chemical hazards. Or how about a toy made by a similar overseas company that has been “inadvertently” painted with a lead-based paint or coated with another toxic chemical? Can we not adopt a sane set of parameters? Should a small American company that is breaking its back and barely making payroll, to make extremely safe toys be thrown into the same bucket as a conglomerate that has repeatedly made cutting corners an art form? I don’t think so. Let’s all take a deep breath and truly examine the issue and all of it implications. In this awful economic time. with millions of Americans out of work, is it necessary to threaten the livlihood of small American companies that have never had any kind of safety violation, because of multi-nationals who have had millions of toys recalled?”
Bruce Wolk

This entry was posted on Friday, December 26th, 2008 at 7:36 pm and is filed under Happy Panda. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.