(D-Maine)
Don’t look now, but the holiday season is just around the corner — and while it does seem to start earlier every year, the truth is that we are only a month away from Thanksgiving, and after that it’s just a little more than four short weeks to Christmas.
Unfortunately, the anticipation of serving Thanksgiving dinners and handing out toys to our kids has come against the backdrop in recent weeks of headlines about tainted food and dangerous toys, many of them imported from China. This has caused many Americans concern about the products that they are bringing into their homes.
It has become clear that we need to do a better job on two things: monitoring the safety of products that we use and produce in this country, and ensuring that what we bring in from abroad will not be harmful.
On the first point, the Congress has passed a series of bills to improve children’s safety and protect against dangerous products. Earlier this month, we passed four bipartisan pieces of legislation as part of broader effort to increase safety.
The first bill, the Children’s Gasoline Burn Prevention Act, protects children from death or serious injury from burn hazards by requiring the same child-resistant caps for all gasoline containers, whether sold with or without gasoline. The second, the Danny Keysar Child Product Safety Notification Act, helps inform parents about unsafe cribs, high chairs and other durable infant and toddler products requiring direct consumer notification of recalls of these products.
The third bill provides a stronger incentive for companies to report safety problems with their products by increasing the maximum civil penalty for violations of the Consumer Product Safety Act from $1.82 million to $10 million over two years. As CPSC Commissioner Thomas Moore has stated, “Perhaps some companies would be less likely to try to stall our agency by putting off reporting hazardous products if we had penalties that were more commensurate with the harm they can cause.”
The fourth bill helps protect children from drowning hazards by requiring the use of proper anti-entrapment drain covers in pools and spas and by creating a swimming pool safety grant program to encourage states to adopt comprehensive safety laws. Drowning is the second highest cause of accidental deaths among American children, ranking right behind automobile accidents.
These bills are a start toward ensuring that American products are safe for kids. But there is also the growing question of imported products. In recent months, a series of consumer products from China — from toys, to pet food, to toothpaste — have been found to be dangerous or tainted.
As part of an immediate solution, I have cosponsored the Children’s Products Safety Act (H.R. 3499). This bill will stop dangerous products from getting into the hands of children by requiring that all toys or products intended for use by children 5 years of age or under have a certificate of compliance with U.S. consumer products safety standards issued by an independent, third-party testing agency. The bill prohibits the importation of any children’s products that lack the third-party certificate of compliance.
This bill will provide a valuable layer of protection for imported products. However, it’s also important to look at the big picture — because what we are seeing with the wave of tainted imports is really part of the price we are paying for our nation’s long-term trade policies.
For too long, we have allowed our trade to proceed on an uneven playing field. Countries with low worker pay, loose environmental protections, and shoddy product standards have had access to our markets, while we have had limited access to theirs. Trade deals like NAFTA and CAFTA have further expanded a system that puts our workers — and our American standards — at an unfair competitive disadvantage. To make it worse, our tax laws have allowed, or even encouraged, outsourcing to other countries. The result has been the loss of jobs and a severe erosion of our manufacturing capacity. And now, we are seeing products manufactured overseas that do not meet our safety standards arriving on American shores.
The bills that the Congress is working to pass will help maintain the level of safety that American families expect and deserve. In the long term, we also need to work on reforming our trade laws and building up our nation’s manufacturing capacity, in order to build our economy, but also to have a stronger hand in keeping our products safe.
