Bracing for Gustav – National Consumers League

/in /by

It’s been three years since Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, and as we commemorate the anniversary by remembering the victims and destruction it left behind, the region is once again preparing for a serious tropical storm, Gustav, which is currently headed towards Jamaica. You can follow Gustav’s path here.

The federal government offers resources for consumers from all parts of the country on how to prepare for natural disasters and other emergencies, including hurricanes, earthquakes, wildfires, and more at www.ready.gov.

Back to School, Back to Work? – National Consumers League

/in /by

In Washington, DC, where the National Consumers League is headquartered, today is the first day of school for hundreds of thousands of kids. The DC Metro area is certainly not unique; students across the country will be filing back into school buildings across the country this week and next, following Labor Day weekend. Earlier this summer, we warned young people about the dangers of taking on summer work that falls into our Five Worst Jobs for Teens categories (landscaping, traveling sales crews, agriculture, and more). Just because summer’s coming to an end doesn’t mean that the hazards of dangerous work are no longer a threat.

According to the U.S. Department of Labor, under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), 14- and 15-year-olds may work outside school hours in various non-manufacturing, non-mining, non-hazardous jobs under certain conditions.

Permissible work hours for 14- and 15-year-olds are:

  • 3 hours on a school day;
  • 18 hours in a school week;
  • 8 hours on a non-school day;
  • 40 hours in a non-school week; and
  • between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m., except from June 1 through Labor Day, when nighttime work hours are extended to 9 p.m.

Child labor laws vary from state from state. Please check with your state department of labor as well. The Department of Labor provides a list of contact information, according to where you live. To learn more about what jobs are too dangerous for underage workers, check out our Five Worst Jobs list. And to learn how to protect yourself on the job, check out our Six Tips for Working Youth. Parents, learn what to watch out for if your teen is working or looking for a job this academic year — or any time.

Good News: Medicare Bill Passes in the Senate – National Consumers League

/in /by

By Catherine Bourque, NCL Health Intern

This summer, Catherine has interned in the health policy department at the National Consumers League. She’s from Washington, DC and, this fall, will begin her senior year at Cornell University, where she’s studying Government and Spanish.

About a month ago, both houses of Congress voted to override President Bush’s veto of HR 6331, the Medicare Physician Payment Bill, which stopped pay reductions to physicians treating Medicare patients. We at the National Consumers League support the passage of the bill. It will be crucial to protecting the healthcare of senior citizens across the country who would have been denied care had Congress not taken action to protect this important program and the providers who make the program possible.

Some background: on July 1st, a 10 percent reduction in the pay rate to Medicare physicians went into effect, leading many physicians to stop accepting Medicare patients for cost reasons and making it difficult for many senior citizens to find physicians who would. The Medicare bill will delay the 10 percent deduction for 18 months, financing the continued payments to physicians with a reduction in payment to the Medicare Advantage program, the Medicare health plan program.

After both the House of Representatives and the Senate voted by veto-proof margins to pass the bill, President Bush followed through on his threat to veto the bill, citing that the bill would hurt the Medicare Advantage program. The Medicare Advantage program provides flexibility for Medicare beneficiaries to enroll in private insurance programs.

The House overrode the veto by a vote of 383 to 41, with 24 more Republicans voting in favor of the bill. Similarly, in the Senate, the veto was overridden by a vote of 70 to 26 with 21 Republicans voting to override the veto. While not a permanent fix for the Medicare payment system, the passage of this bill shows Congress’s commitment to providing care for the elderly and making this care a reasonable venture for physicians.

How’d You Do? – National Consumers League

/in /by

Yesterday, we shared four sample LifeSmarts question to test your ‘smarts. How’d you do?

  • Foods that bear the radura logo have been: c. Treated by irradiation
  • You are a 16-year-old employee. Which of the following are you not allowed to do under the federal child labor laws: c. Be a delivery driver
  • Which of the following calls would be prohibited when you register for the National Do Not Call list? c. Telemarketing calls
  • What kind of personal information is not covered by any federal privacy law? c. What you watch on cable television
  • Which of the following is not an advantage of using compact fluorescent light bulbs instead of incandescent light bulbs? c. They cost less

How We Spent Our Summer Vacation – National Consumers League

/in /by

The back-to-school sales prove it: Summer is coming to an end. During these warm days, NCL staff has been busy preparing for the 2008-2009 LifeSmarts program year, which will officially go live in just a few weeks. To get your juices flowing, see if you can handle a couple LifeSmarts practice questions. (We’ll post the answers tomorrow.)

Foods that bear the radura logo have been:

a. Organically grown
b. Treated with pesticides
c. Treated by irradiation

You are a 16-year-old employee. Which of the following are you not allowed to do under the federal child labor laws:

a. Work as a hired farmworker
b. Cook on a grill in a restaurant
c. Be a delivery driver

Which of the following calls would be prohibited when you register for the National Do Not Call list?

a. Political calls
b. Surveys
c. Telemarketing calls

What kind of personal information is not covered by any federal privacy law?

a. Titles of videos you rent
b. Items you buy at a supermarket
c. What you watch on cable television

Which of the following calls would be prohibited when you register for the National Do Not Call list?

a. Political calls
b. Surveys
c. Telemarketing calls

Which of the following is not an advantage of using compact fluorescent light bulbs instead of incandescent light bulbs?

a.  They last longer
b.  They use less energy
c.  They cost less

Stop! for Brake Safety Awareness – National Consumers League

/in /by

Everybody’s talking about gas and fuel efficiency these days, but this month we’re celebrating Brake Safety Awareness. Keeping your car in good shape can prevent crashes and protect your investment, and brakes are one of the most important systems in a vehicle. This month in NCL’s Consumer Calendar, we’re helping consumers learn the importance of a safe brake system and urging them to pull into an auto repair shop to get their brake

s checked during Brake Safety Awareness Week, which is coming up: Aug 24-30.

During Brake Safety Awareness Week, an initiative of the Motorist Assurance Program (MAP) and the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance (CVSA), all MAP Participating Service Facilities will check your car’s brakes for free by technicians that are MAP qualified or ASE certified.

Unemployed = Unemployment Benefits, Right? – National Consumers League

/in /by

by Sally Greenberg, NCL Executive Director

Not necessarily. I always assumed that when you worked, then lost your job, you’re automatically entitled to unemployment benefits—they are part of our American “safety net.” Turns out I was wrong: according to a recent story in the Wall Street Journal, July 29, only 37% of the country’s unemployed received benefits in 2007, down from 55% in 1958 and 44% in 2001. The Journal based its numbers on Labor Department statistics.

The workers who don’t qualify for unemployment include part timers, people who quit or were fired, and those who didn’t earn enough money in a one-year “base period” that often excludes the most recent 3-6 months. Most states’ base period includes the first four of the last five completed quarters. States often require an average weekly wage in calculating their base period.

Covering a mere 37% of the unemployed is unconscionable. Unemployment benefits are often the only life jacket that workers can grab onto to keep food on the table and the lights on. Low income workers bear the brunt of this policy, with fewer than 15% of low wage workers getting benefits, according to the Government Accountability Office.

The House of Representatives passed a bill last year to provide an additional $7 billion to allow part-time workers to receive benefits and count earnings more generously. The Senate is supposed to take up a similar bill this fall. Our friends at NELP (National Employment Law Project) are working to get the bill passed and they argue that 300,000 additional workers would qualify for benefits if states changed the way they determine the base earnings period. An employer-based group in Texas was quoted as saying the bill isn’t a “panacea for everyone who happens not to be working.” No, but laid off workers aren’t looking for a panacea. They’re looking for a little help to feed their families. At an annual cost of $550 million, we ought to be able to make that happen.

If You’re Cheated Out of Wages, You May Be On Your Own – National Consumers League

/in /by

by Reid Maki, NCL Director of Social Responsibility and Fair Labor Standards

Have you or a friend ever been cheated out of your pay? The most common wage violations in America involve employers who refuse to pay the minimum wage or refuse to pay the overtime wages that workers earn. Often, these violations affect the working poor—the very people who can least afford to lose the wages.

The Wage and Hour Division of the U.S. Department of Labor is supposed to protect American workers who don’t receive their proper pay, but the agency is not doing enough, according to testimony at a House of Representatives Education and Labor Committee hearing I attended on July 15th.

“As a nation, we face a crisis of wage theft,” testified Kim Bobo, the executive director of Interfaith Worker Justice, a national network of 60 local affiliates that engage the religious community in efforts to help workers, especially low-wage workers. According to Bobo, two million U.S. workers aren’t paid the minimum wage, three million are misclassified as independent contractors instead of employees, and millions more are illegally denied overtime pay. “The Wage and Hour division is failing to protect workers from wage theft because of its woefully inadequate enforcement of the federal wage and hour laws,” she complained.

One of the primary reasons for this lack of enforcement: Wage and Hour is grossly understaffed. Less than 750 investigators are available to go out into the field and look into workers’ complaints about being cheated. That translates to one investigator for every 10,000 businesses. Bobo noted that if the ratio of investigators to businesses that existed in 1941 held today, we would have 34,000 investigators.

Two officials from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) testified about Wage and Hour’s performance. Ann-Marie Lasowski, acting director of education, workforce and income security issues, testified that from fiscal year 1997 to 2007, the number of Wage and Hour enforcement actions decreased by more than a third, from approximately 47,000 in 1997 to just under 30,000 in 2007. Lasowski said that Wage and Hour did not allocate resources well. She said the division commissioned studies to help it identify industries where abuses were likely to occur—mostly in low-wage industries —but then failed to allocate extra resources to enforce violations in those industries.

Greg Kutz, GAO’s managing director of forensic audits and special investigations, told the House panel that when researchers looked at 15 Wage and Hour investigations they found frighteningly inadequate performance. Some complaints by workers were rejected simply because employers failed to provide accurate information. In some cases, Wage and Hour investigators could not locate employers even though GAO researchers found the same employers easily. In another case, Wage and Hour closed a complaint because the employer refused to pay back the lost wages that the investigator determined they owed the worker. In another instance, Wage and Hour delayed investigating a case for a year and then told the worker that they were dropping the complaint because the statute of limitations for assessing back wages was close to expiring.

Acting Administrator of the Wage and Hour Division Alexander Passantino denied GAO’s claims and attacked the GAO’s research methodology. Passantino noted that in fiscal year 2007, Wage and Hour collected $220 million in back wages, the highest total ever collected, despite a drop of over 220 investigators—23 percent—over the last seven years.

Democrats on the committee, including Chairman George Miller of California, did not accept his defense of the Department of Labor, suggesting that DOL was failing the American worker. “Although the Department of Labor has the necessary tools to fight wage theft, the GAO investigation suggests that the problem of wage theft is only getting worse because of weaker enforcement,” said Miller.

The National Consumers League is concerned about any system that asks a single federal investigator to enforce labor violations in over 10,000 work places. That’s just asking for failure. We hope the next president will take a step toward correcting this problem by pledging to double the number of investigators in his first term—that’s still not enough to solve the problem, but it’s a start. In the meantime, DOL should take a hard look at the GAO’s recommendations to see if Wage and Hour can do a better job of allocating resources to protect American’s most vulnerable workers.

NCL applauds passage of historic product safety bill – National Consumers League

/in /by

August 4, 2008

Contact: 202-835-3323, media@nclnet.org

Washington, DC – The National Consumers League commended the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate for passing “truly historic reforms in the way we deal with consumer products” – reforms the League’s Executive Director, Sally Greenberg, said were “mere pipe dreams only a few years ago.” First and foremost, “the bill will provide badly needed improvements that will help enormously in keeping kids safe,” Greenberg said. The bill, the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act of 2008, awaits the President’s signature.

Greenberg noted that the presence of excessive levels of lead discovered in toys only a few years ago was a “wakeup call to consumers and Congress,” and opened the door to broad and badly needed reforms of the Consumer Product Safety Commission, its budget, and its underlying statute.

The Consumer Product Safety Commission was “withering on the vine” Greenberg said, despite being the only federal agency charged with keeping over 15,000 consumer products – many of them children’s products safe. Traditionally underfunded and under the radar screen, the CPSC was operating with half the employees it began with in the mid-1970s and a fraction of its original budget, while the number of consumer products has increased exponentially.

“To the credit of consumer advocates, they rolled up their sleeves and worked closely with Congress, notably Chairman Daniel Inouye (D-HI), Senator Ted Stevens (R-AK), Chairman Mark Pryor (D-AR), Senator John Sununu (R-NH), Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA), Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX), Senator Bill Nelson (D-FL), Senator Claire McCaskill (D-MO), and Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA). Ultimately they came up with historic reforms aimed at a system in deep need of repair. Greenberg noted the bi-partisan support for the bill, and the positive comments of the head of the Toy Industry of America, who called the bill’s passage “the right thing to do.”

The Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act of 2008 will:

  • Effectively ban lead from children’s toys, a position NCL has long endorsed. Lead is a proven toxin for children’s development and can do lifelong damage. No object intended for use by children should contain anything but the most minute amounts of lead.
  • Require toymakers to have independent labs to test products before they are sold; many consumers assumed this was happening already, but instead, too many toys and products intended for use by children were introduced into the marketplace without proper testing and analysis. Consumers may eventually see labels certifying toys have been tested before being sold, and consumers buying online or through a catalog will be able to see the same warning label that appears on packaging to warn parents of small parts or other potential hazards.
  • Allow the CPSC to post information about products that consumers have reported to the agency as being dangerous or defective; other federal agencies allow consumers to go to their Web sites to check on products before they purchase them. A provision of CPSC’s law prevented it from posting this information until the agency checked in with the manufacturer. That will change under the new law.
  • Increase fines against companies who fail to report to the CPSC– as required by the statute – evidence that a product may be present a substantial product hazard.
  • Allow state attorneys general to help enforce federal product safety laws and take manufacturers to court to keep dangerous products off the market. This is important. Attorneys general play a critical health and safety role for their own citizens. These state officials have often incubated consumer cases and protections that would take the federal government far longer to adopt.
  • Give this beleaguered agency the funding it needs to carry out its many and growing responsibilities. The CPSC budget will nearly double to $136 million, from $80 million for this fiscal year; the agency has already hired additional inspectors for the nation’s largest ports, where dangerous imports can enter the country currently unnoticed because of weak enforcement.

Finally, the bill contains a provision that Greenberg said consumer advocates and Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) had been working on for years. Named after a little boy who died when a recalled portable crib collapsed, choking him, the Danny Keysar Product Safety Notification Act, which is contained within the new bill, would require mandatory standards and testing for specific infant and toddler products, ban the sale, lease or use in commercial settings of cribs that do not meet current safety standards, and would require manufacturers to include product registration cards with new products to facilitate notice of recalled products.

###

About the National Consumers League
Founded in 1899, the National Consumers League is America’s pioneer consumer organization. Its mission is to protect and promote social and economic justice for consumers and workers in the United States and abroad. NCL is a private, nonprofit membership organization. For more information, visit www.nclnet.org.

Historic Consumer Product Bill a Boon for Kids’ Safety – National Consumers League

/in /by

by Sally Greenberg

In my years working as product safety counsel for Consumers Union, I spent a lot of time trying to improve product safety for consumers, especially kids. This week both the US House of Representatives and the US Senate supported truly historic reforms – reforms that seemed like mere pipe dreams only a few years ago. The bill, the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act of 2008, awaits the President’s signature.

One thing I have learned over the years, as well, is that a product safety crisis – like the one in 2000 when we learned that thousands of Firestone Tires were defective and separated off of (mostly) Ford Explorer at high speeds, killing hundreds of drivers and passengers – or the presence of excessive levels of lead in the toys our children are playing with – is a wakeup call for legislators and consumers alike. These crises can open the door to more close look at the laws that affect safety and ways to improve them.

To the credit of my fellow consumer advocates and members of congress from both parties, they rolled up their sleeves and worked together for reforms. The catalyzing event was high lead levels in toys discovered over the past two years – that opened the door to scrutiny of the federal agency charged with keeping our products safe, the Consumer Product Safety Commission. Traditionally underfunded and under the radar screen, the CPSC was operating with half the employees it began with in the mid-1970s while the number of consumer products had increased exponentially. Worthy of note, as well, were the comments by the top guy at the Toy Industry of America, who said the bill was “the right thing to do.”

Among the bill’s provisions, it will:

  • Effectively ban lead from children’s toys, a position NCL has long endorsed. Lead is a proven toxin for children’s development and can do lifelong damage. No object intended for use by children should contain anything but the most minute amounts of lead.
  • Require toymakers to have independent labs to test products before they are sold; many consumers assumed this was happening already, but instead, too many toys and products intended for children were introduced into the marketplace without proper testing and analysis Consumers may eventually see labels certifying toys have been tested before being sold, and consumers buying online or through a catalog will be able to see the same warning label that appears on packaging to warn parents of small parts or other potential hazards.
  • Allow the CPSC to post information about products that have consumers have reported to the agency as being dangerous or defective; other federal agencies allow consumers to go to their websites to check on products before they purchase them. A provision of CPSC’s law prevented it from posting this information until the agency checked in with the manufacturer. That will change under the new law.
  • State attorneys general will have the authority to help enforce federal product safety laws and take manufacturers to court to keep dangerous products off the market.
  • This beleaguered agency will finally get the funding it needs to carry out its many and growing responsibilities. The CPSC budget will nearly double to $136 million, from $80 million for this fiscal year; the agency has already hired additional inspectors for the nation’s largest ports, where dangerous imports can enter the country currently unnoticed because of weak enforcement.

Finally, while at Consumers Union I had the honor of working with Linda Ginzel and Boaz Keysar after their toddler son died in a recalled and defective portable crib that killed other children as well. They have been heroic in their fight for safer kids’ products and better regulations to protect them. I am so happy that after many years of working to get these reforms into the Consumer Product Safety Act, there will finally be a requirement for mandatory standards and testing for specific infant and toddler products, we will see a ban on the sale, lease or use in commercial settings of cribs that do not meet current safety standards, and product registration cards will be required with new products to facilitate notice of recalled products.

The Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act of 2008 includes many of the proposals consumer groups have worked to get enacted for a decade. It took a wake-up call like high levels of lead in toys to get Congress’ attention to the sad state of product safety regulation – and hats off to the members and their staffs in both parties for their support – but with the enactment of this bill we will see a far better safety environment, and most important, vastly safer toys and products for the most precious and vulnerable consumers, our kids.