Made Where, Exactly?

By now you’ve probably heard about all of the toy recalls going on over the past few weeks – mostly about lead paint used on toys made in China, although there have also been toys recalled for choking hazards (small pieces that can fall off or be gnawed off and then swallowed by a toddler), sharp points or edges, and other problems. This has driven a lot of people who had never given the first thought to the subject of outsourcing to start thinking about it. I can’t help wondering if this is going to be like waking up one morning and finding a six-ton elephant living under your bed. You’d think people would notice before this…

According to the article on USA Today Online, something on the order of 80% of all toys sold in the United States are made in China, and another 10% or so are made in other parts of Asia and Europe, leaving only 10% that are actually made in the US – and the majority of those are the so-called “nostalgia” toys like the Slinky and wooden blocks, and so on. This will make things rather difficult for all of those alarmed parents who are swearing to only purchase toys made in the USA for Christmas this year. Especially since all of the really “cool” toys (e.g. the ones with effective marketing) are made in China, and the kids are unlikely to warm to “nostalgia” toys instead.

Even worse, there’s some debate as to how much of the problem is in the manufacturing, and how much is simply in the design. The affected toy companies swear that they specified safe, non-toxic, non-leaded paint, while the Chinese manufacturing people say they were just following the specifications given to them by the toy companies. And you can’t blame the rest of the problems on the manufacturing plants; they aren’t the ones who designed toys with small, easy-to-gnaw-off-and-swallow parts in the first place. The Consumer Product Safety Commission website tracks all of the recalls, but it notes that about 10% of all of the toy recalls are on toys made in the USA, or in other words, a number proportional to the percentage of toys on the market that were made here in the first place.

At the heart of the problem is the debate over outsourcing, or more accurately, the remarkable ability of people to stick their heads in the metaphoric sand and ignore the debate over outsourcing, at least until it affects their jobs, home lives, or something they were going to purchase. One of the side effects of a global economy is that it’s not always possible to purchase the products you want and still buy goods made in your country of origin. There was a minor blip in the news last year when it was discovered that Ford Mustangs actually had fewer American-made parts in them than Honda Civics made in the Honda Plant in Ohio, but that drew very little attention, except from those people who wanted to buy a Mustang…

The bottom line is that the American dominance of the world’s manufacturing sector, if it ever existed to begin with, has gone now, and will not be returning. If you want to buy goods such as a television set, a home computer, a cellular telephone, or an automobile, any of these things will almost certainly contain parts that have been outsourced to some overseas manufacturer, and some of them will not be available from US factories at all. You could simply swear off all of these, and all of the other goods made overseas, and live on antiques and products made in the USA if you want to, but I wouldn’t expect the kids to be all that happy with your decision come Christmas morning…