Toy safety regulations need steep penalties

Hollywood resident Alicia Camargo’s eyes told the story.

We were chatting at a Toys R Us outlet off La Cienega Boulevard where Camargo, 45, had just bought an Elmo doll for her 2-year-old niece. (If you don’t know who Elmo is, you need to watch more “Sesame Street.”)

So, I asked, how do you know that toy is safe?

Camargo glanced down at the large bag in her hand and her eyes went wide when she realized she didn’t know the answer to that question.

“I hope it’s safe,” she said. “My niece just asked for this and I bought it. I never thought it could be dangerous.”

She shouldn’t have to. But last year, more than 25 million hazardous playthings -- most of them produced in Chinese factories -- were recalled by U.S. manufacturers and federal regulators.

The Toy Industry Assn., a leading trade group, responded last week to growing pressure for action by unveiling a new “testing and safety verification system” that it said will “restore the confidence of American consumers in the safety of toys.”

The industry’s guidelines have three key features: greater attention to safety during the design phase of a toy; increased testing before and after a toy goes into production; and increased attention to ensuring that safety standards are met during the manufacturing process.

That’s great, as far as it goes. But the reality is that the $22-billion toy industry’s guidelines are only voluntary, and a manufacturer could still ignore them if it wanted to.

That’s the problem at the heart of virtually all product-safety issues. Our system relies primarily on manufacturers policing themselves -- the honor system, in other words -- and empowers regulators to step in after consumers have been hurt or endangered.

Even then, nearly all recalls are done on a voluntary basis and typically follow months of dithering as regulators and manufacturers come to terms on what to do.

Voluntary safety standards? The toy industry needs to do a whole lot better than that.

Joan Lawrence, vice president of standards and government affairs for the Toy Industry Assn., told me not to worry because the industry’s voluntary safety standards could become mandatory under legislation pending in Congress.

“Our aim is that you won’t be able to sell a product in this country if you haven’t verified compliance with the law,” she said.

Well, that’s nice. But it’s not clear what shape the legislation will be in when it finally makes its way from Capitol Hill to the president’s desk.

In December, the House of Representatives passed a bill that would require testing and other safeguards for many toys. But -- and this is important -- it contains a loophole that would still allow tests for some types of hazards to remain voluntary.

For instance, testing for lead content or small parts that could choke a kid would be required. Testing for potentially dangerous magnets or noise levels would be at a company’s discretion.

A separate bill in the Senate closes that loophole to some extent. But it’s being fought by manufacturers in part because of a provision that would make it easier for consumers to lodge complaints with regulators and for those complaints to be readily accessible in a searchable online database.

And then there’s the real catch: Neither Congress nor the federal government’s Consumer Product Safety Commission has jurisdiction abroad. About 80% of toys sold in the United States are manufactured in China.

A nonprofit group called Kids in Danger issued a report last week showing there were 231 recalls involving 46 million kids’ products in 2007. The defective products resulted in at least 657 injuries and six deaths, the group reported.

Take the case of Hasbro Inc.’s Chinese-made Easy-Bake Oven, nearly a million of which had to be recalled not once but twice last year after dozens of little girls had their fingers or hands caught in the oven’s door. Some kids also experienced second- or third-degree burns. One 5-year-old had to have a finger partially amputated.

In the span of just two weeks last year, El Segundo’s Mattel Inc., the world’s largest toy maker, announced the recall of about 20 million playthings.

The toy industry’s guidelines would require (voluntarily or otherwise) manufacturers to send an independent auditor to overseas factories to ensure that they meet U.S. safety standards.

That auditor would then issue a certificate of compliance that the industry says would be placed on product packages to soothe the nerves of anxious parents.

But let’s be realistic. Unless that auditor is standing on the factory floor every single day, defective products will come off the line. That could either be the fault of technical glitches or deliberate efforts on the part of Chinese factory owners to save a yuan or two.

We need a system with some teeth, including the certainty of heavy fines and other penalties for any manufacturer that sells defective products, no matter where they were produced.

The House bill would raise the cap on civil penalties from the current $1.8 million to $10 million. The Senate had been looking at a cap of as much as $100 million, but is now considering a more industry-friendly sum of $20 million.

As it stands, few fines even approach the cap. Fisher-Price agreed to pay $975,000 last year for failing to report that its Little People Animal Sounds Farm posed a choking hazard to kids.

In 2005, regulators imposed what they hailed as a record $4-million fine on Graco Children’s Products for failing to inform the government about more than 12 million hazardous goods, some of which resulted in fatal accidents.

But the case actually involved 16 different products, including high chairs and toddler beds. This means the fine for each safety violation was a relatively paltry $250,000.

The Senate was on the right track the first time. The only way toys manufactured abroad are ever going to be safer is if the U.S. companies that sell them are accountable for their compliance with safety standards.

The only way I can think of to make that happen isn’t through the good offices of third-party auditors. It’s through the threat of really heavy fines if a bad toy makes it to store shelves.

Last week’s recall of 143 million pounds of beef sold by a Chino slaughterhouse was noteworthy not just because it was the largest-ever such recall but because federal inspectors never spotted anything untoward at the facility.

If Jack in the Box, a fast-food chain that bought meat from the plant, had faced the prospect of hefty fines for serving potentially tainted burgers, something tells me the company would have been more diligent than federal authorities in keeping an eye on production.

I asked Julie Vallese, a spokeswoman for the Consumer Product Safety Commission, if the toy industry’s new guidelines go far enough. She indicated that there’s room for improvement.

“We want products to be manufactured safely in the first place,” Vallese said. “That’s where the industry needs to step up.”

Seems to me the toy industry needs to spend less time cooking up voluntary guidelines and more time attending Chinese-language classes.

We all know what the problem is, and where. Now let’s see toy companies take some real action.

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Consumer Confidential runs Wednesdays and Sundays. Send your tips or feedback to david.lazarus@latimes.com.