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Unsafe Toys? U.S. Corporate Policies Share the Blame |
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Nearly every day, we read about yet another recall of toys that contain excessive levels of lead. In the past two months alone, more than 13 million toys have been recalled after tests indicated lead levels that sometimes reached nearly 200 times the federal safety limit.
One reason so many U.S. imports are unsafe: Failed U.S. trade and regulatory policies.
Tim Newman of the International Labor Rights Forum (ILRF) offers another: Greed.
At Labor Is Not a Commodity, Newman writes the sourcing policies of companies like Wal-Mart bear a lot of the responsibility for the problems in China’s toy factories.
Retailers such as Wal-Mart put so much pressure on suppliers to produce cheap goods that health, environmental and labor protections get brushed aside. Wal-Mart is the nation’s top importer of Chinese-made products. The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) reports the giant retailer’s reliance on cheap goods made in China has cost this country nearly 200,000 jobs since 2001.
The U.S. trade deficit with China reached a whopping $233 billion last year, and imports for Wal-Mart alone accounted for $27 billion—11 percent of the growth in the U.S. trade deficit with China since 2001.
Newman cites a new report from ILRF, which analyzes Wal-Mart’s ethical standards and its effect on working conditions globally. Ethical Standards and Working Conditions in Wal-Mart’s Supply Chain concludes that Wal-Mart has not invested the necessary resources or taken the necessary actions to ensure that its ethical standards program is actually enforced.
In sum:
Wal-Mart has a clear idea on who should be held responsible if factories fail to provide workers with proper working conditions; anyone but Wal-Mart. The company believes that “ultimately our suppliers and their factories must realize the benefits of improving worker conditions and incorporate improved standards and processes into their businesses.” However, Wal-Mart fails to recognize that its purchasing policies make this difficult and in fact encourage very different practices.
Wal-Mart has designed its system of production to contain as many degrees of separation between the corporate head and factory workers as possible, leaving the middleman as the scapegoat.
Click here to read a copy of the report and here to read ILRF Executive Director Bama Athreya’s testimony before a Senate committee on sweatshop conditions in China’s toy factories.
2 Comments
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First Wal-Mart abuses it’s female workers and now it sells Chinese toxic lead based toys. It is the pinacle of capitalist greed and lake of concern for it’s female workers and children who die because of the toys. It’s unbelievable.
I think part of the reason companies don’t respond well in the face of a product recall is that they just didn’t have the data available to them to tell them the extent of the problem. The data or the policies in place that would make the data readily accessible — nevermind the policies to analyze the data about products *before* defective ones got shipped to consumers.
I write about IT and information management and did a story on this topic recently — “Beyond Peter Pan: How ConAgra’s Pot Pie Recall Bakes in Hard Lessons for Supply Chain Management.” It’s here, if you want to take a look: http://www.cio.com/article/148054/.
Bush’s call last week for more product inspections and recall authority would add a layer of supply chain complexity and regulatory compliance for many companies. But it’s not clear to me that the plan would actually reduce product defects.
Some optimists say Bush’s proposals, if enacted, would get US companies to think about items other than “low cost” when choosing an offshore supplier or manufacturer to work with. That is, as one manufacturing expert I talked to for this follow-up story (http://www.cio.com/article/152050/) said: “Maybe this will result in companies sourcing no longer on lowest cost, but on what those suppliers can provide in terms of product testing and reliable data about product testing. Lowest cost suppliers may actually cost more, if you consider the lifetime cost of your product. Recalls are expensive.”
I dunno. I hope. But I’m skeptical.
Kim Nash
Senior Editor
CIO Magazine
knash@cio.com