A post from Brian Schwarz of China Challenges brought to my attention this news piece: Mattel getting a waver from the government from implementing 3rd party safety checks1. There is one thing I particularly like about this post… it points out that the toys come from Mattel, not just “come from China”. When the big lead-painted toys scare went off two years ago, everyone was complaining about the poisoned products that “came from China”. This hid the real story, which was that Mattel, in its search for greater and greater profits, decided to not control its supply chain. Thus, Mattel, not the country of the People’s Republic of China, potentially exposed children to lead poisoning.
Interestingly, the conservative commentors on the site which China Challenges links to say that the law is stupid for two reasons: 1) that the law hurts small business, and 2) because private laboratories are better than third party laboratories for testing products made in China. In my not-so-experienced view, I think this second point sort of missed the mark. Isn’t the problem that Mattel… and many other companies… is not that their testing laboratories failed to test accurately, but that the companies failed to monitor their supply chain?
- FYI, Brian’s link on his website points to a blog post about this topic from a site run by Michelle Malkin. My feelings toward her, and all of Fox news types can be summed up by John Stewart, when he says to Fox News, “Go F_ck yourself”. “Terrible, cynical, and disingenuous.” Hence, I posted the Yahoo news link to the original newsource ↩
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