I'm not sure if this has been posted here recently. If so, my apologies. The deadline is coming up and I believe that all artists should sign the petition and contact their Congress and Senate reps. I'm sure that the Etsy boards are full of discussions about this if you'd like to participate. This will affect children's clothing too, and most of all, it's an attack on hand made.
Could a skeptical like me speculate that there might be big money sponsoring this proposed law? The hand made industry has taken off big time, and I imagine that big manufacturers are concerned with their chunk being smaller; in fact, I believe (but have no stats to back me up) that the current state of disappointment from the public in regards to anything China made has spilled over to kids' products too.
This could easily be a measure designed to curb further growth of the hand made market.
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"In 2007, large toy manufacturers who outsource their production to China and other developing countries violated the public's trust. They were selling toys with dangerously high lead content, toys with unsafe small parts, toys with improperly secured and easily swallowed small magnets, and toys made from chemicals that made kids sick. Almost every problem toy in 2007 was made in China.
The United States Congress rightly recognized that the Consumer Products Safety Commission (CPSC) lacked the authority and staffing to prevent dangerous toys from being imported into the US. So, they passed the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act (CPSIA) in August, 2008. Among other things, the CPSIA bans lead and phthalates in toys, mandates third-party testing and certification for all toys and requires toy makers to permanently label each toy with a date and batch number.
All of these changes will be fairly easy for large, multinational toy manufacturers to comply with. Large manufacturers who make thousands of units of each toy have very little incremental cost to pay for testing and updating their molds to include batch labels.
For small American, Canadian, and European toymakers, however, the costs of mandatory testing, to the tune of up to $4,000 per toy, will likely drive them out of business. And the handful of larger toy makers who still employ workers in the United States face increased costs to comply with the CPSIA, even though American-made toys had nothing to do with the toy safety problems of 2007. Toy makers won't be the only ones impacted by the CPSIA, the thousands of US businesses who offer clothing, jewelry and other gifts for children --in essence-- the entire children's industry will be as well.
The CPSIA simply forgot to exclude the class of toys that have earned and kept the public's trust.
The result, unless the law is modified, is that handmade toys will no longer be legal in the US.Thriving small businesses are crucial to the financial health of our nation. Let's amend the CPSIA so that all businesses large and small are able to comply and survive!"
Please check
Facebook group and the web site of
Handmade Toy Alliance
Today has been a day full of surprises, and not very friendly ones!
