As is usually the case with the American government, small businesses get the steam roller treatment. Here is another example of how government and politicians are "out of touch." American toy makers are being threatened by the legislation designed to keep American children safe. The Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act (CPSIA) requires toy manufacturers to hire independent testing laboratories to test each toy brought to market to assure its safety. While it is wonderful to protect our children from the poisonous toys dumped on the American market by Chinese manufacturers, small scale American and Canadian makers of wooden toys would be forced to pay up to $4,000 per toy design to comply with this legislation. In fact, unless the legislation is changed providing waivers for the home craftsman, cottage industry toy makers, they will be driven out of business, despite having a flawless record in providing safe toys to American consumers. With regard to wooden toys, if a craftsman uses safe materials, with parts properly secured, in age appropriate designs, that should be enough.
You can get more information about this from the Handmade Toy Alliance
The smallest businesses in America are the ones most capable of sustaining the economy and providing growth when we start to emerge from recession. If a company consisting of one person hires help, the economic impact doubles. And Americans need to be enabled to start new businesses without being immediately closed by unreasonable regulation.
This is incredible. One more example of cluelessness among government types.
ReplyDeleteMario
It is amazing to me that so many people don't even know that there are American craftsmen. It would have been so easy to have written a waiver for American made wooden toys in quantities of less than 10,000 per design per year. But as I have mentioned before, we ARE a nation of idiots.
ReplyDeleteIt all started when we end the household traditions of making stuff. By making stuff you learn about materials, tools, and even about gravity. And even better, you learn about yourself and become wise.
Doug,
ReplyDeleteWith all due respect to our brethren in Europe and Asia, I submit that there is a huge lust for the almighty buck. Lead paint? Who cares. Money and profit are the issues. Offshore outsourcing of production is to blame for much of this. American corporations are looking for maximum return on their investment...the more units they can produce at the cheapest cost, the more money they make. Money is the bottom line. Somewhere along that line someone has forgotten that lead paint and other cheap fixes are really bad for our people and the environment. I am a firm believer in the free enterprise system, but, sadly, greed has taken over. Too many people will do ANYTHING for the almighty dollar...it doesn't matter whether it is good quality design and production or whether it is shoddy materials which are bad for human consumption. There is a certain purity to American homemade, hand-crafted products that are not tainted by the the get-rich-quick mentality. That is readily apparent to me here in North Carolina, arguably the mecca of folks arts and crats. We must get back to the situation of well and hand-made objects. Mass production has not been good for our economy or our souls!
Let's keep up the good fight (and I really don't like to use that word.. perhaps advocacy is better..) for quality, homemade, handmade products. Your website is simply an enormaous breath of fresh air. You are able to keep focused on the hands and what they can do in the face of all adversity...bravo to you. I look at it several times a day just to see what kind of intelligent wisdom is coming next.
JD, thanks for reading and sharing your thoughts. It is actually easy having a hands perspective on things. And it is just like looking out the window. Most are watching out the back window, and I'm watching out the front. Seeing the world through the lens that the hands provide is rather interesting and it is really how people looked at things before we placed all our confidence in experts to interpret phenomena on our behalf.
ReplyDeleteI read the words of William James or John Dewey for example. They were looking at life unfiltered by statistical modeling and accepted what they saw as being real.
That is exactly what craftsmen do. You take a plane and run it along an edge. If it digs in, you know you going against the grain and you turn the board around to go the other way. You don't take the damn thing to a committee for further study.
We have become so subtle and nuanced in our study and analysis that we have lost the thread of truth. But a plane or saw and a piece of wood will restore balance to the wood, the world and the soul at the same time.
I agree that mass production has not been good for us. We forgot that when a craftsman is empowered to create, he himself is created. We decided we would rather spend our resources on cheap goods than invest in the lives of others.
A friend in Asheville, NC told me that she had heard a report that 68 percent of people would gladly take a 5% pay cut to keep others from losing their jobs. I think we have begun to learn that being greedy bastards is unproductive and unsafe. And perhaps the day of greedy bastards is over or at least in remission. I hope!
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ReplyDeleteThe old Bergermeister is back to outlawing toys it seems.
ReplyDeletewell, I doubt anyone will call the FBI when the Grandpa Joe shows up with hand made wooden trucks at the craft show next spring.
I think the legislation will be corrected for it's intended purpose.
Another possibility would've been to avoid adding yet more administrative burden, and just crush the manufacturers (importers, whoever) already found guilty of the misdeeds with enormous fines, directed to helping present and future children harmed by toxic paint or whatever. Presumably this would provide a natural disincentive for such misbehavior in the future.
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