The Brockovich Report

Here's a fact I saw in a Reuter's article: 80 percent of toys are made in China. (I can only assume that is American toys. )

Congress is looking into Mattel.

The U.S. Congressional Committee panel scheduled a Sept 19 hearing on lead tainted toys. And well it should. Seventeen companies just recalled lead tainted toys made in China and they are under scrutiny.

Safeguarding our children from potentially toxic toys should be a given. And now that there's a push toward fine tuning this protection, how can the government proceed to work on dealing with the problem?

For one thing, they should upsize the Consumer Product Safety Commission, whose job is to "protect the public from unreasonable risks of serious injury or death from more than 15,000 types of consumer products under the agency's jurisdiction."

The agency doesn't operate in a vacuum. Their proposed 2008 budget is listed here, online:

http://www.cpsc.gov/CPSCPUB/PUBS/REPORTS/2008plan.pdf

According to the report, ninety percent of Consumer Product Safety Commission's funding is absorbed by staff compensation and staff-related space rental costs. The largest cost increase is staff salaries. The January report projects that CPSC’s current staffing level will increase by $2,167,000, a projected 3.0 percent Federal pay increase ($1,076,000). The increase also includes other costs such asincreased Federal Employee Retirement System (FERS) contributions ($454,000), two extra paid days in 2008 ($295,000), staff within-grade step increases ($158,000), career ladder promotions ($144,000), and health insurance premium increases ($40,000). No details are included indicating the exact salaries of various positions.

But here are some of the cost-cutting measures listed in their plan:

• Over $1 million per year as a result of closing over 40 field offices, converting the jobs to telecommuting.
  
• $300,000 per year by closing the last three regional offices in 2005
  
• 5.6 million per year as a result of recent staff reductions and reorganization in 2006 and 2007
  

They freely admit they have "maximized staff efficiencies and cannot absorb further reductions without having an impact on its product safety activities."

I know the running budget sounds like a lot, but I don't presume to be a number cruncher. For most people, numbers in the millions, billions and trillions are an incomprehensible blur. Let's hope these numbers which were composed in January will be upgraded to compensate increased need now that there's recognition of the scope of the problem.

Don't we need more staff? More offices? More accessibility? Are there any small business owners out there who operate on a shoestring who are thinking Aren't there some broom closets in public buildings that can be converted to small offices, giving some of those telecommuters a local home base with minimum overhead? Can't punitive fees imposed on guilty suppliers defray the expense of a consumer protection agency sized appropriately to a superpower? Think of it--Toys 'R' Us alone recalled one: 27,000 Chinese-Made Lead-Tainted Coloring Cases. How many safety commission man hours would a fine on the Chinese source provide?

So this is what we should do: raise the standards, increase the staff, and give the enforcers teeth to back up the contemporary standards.

Because the problems aren't going away. When lead is under control--lead being something whose current lowball standards were negotiated thirty years ago--there are an awful lot of controllable toxins running rampant, toxins that we need to monitor.

What do you think?