Laws and Regulations

Senators Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) and Jeff Sessions (R-AL) have reintroduced the the Foreign Manufacturers Legal Accountability Act of 2011 (S.1946), requiring foreign manufacturers to have a registered U.S. agent that would accept service of process for civil and regulatory claims. The bill is currently referrred to the Committee on Finance.

I often get asked which product categories are at the highest risk for causing harm to people and damage to an end-user's brand. My regular answer applies a reasonable amount of common sense.

Once more our industry has suffered a hit, in part because of the lack of understanding about its true value.

What does the failure of the super committee mean for businesses? Forbes looks at the what the committee was supposed to do and has come up with four possible scenarios, detailing what each outcome means both for industry and for the U.S. 

When the president calls your industry extraneous, you know there's a problem.

Promotional products have been making headlines lately. Unfortunately, it's not in a way we want.

The Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) recently released a statement claiming a 26 percent reduction, or a drop from 46 to 34 total, in toy recalls from 2010 compared to 2011. The organization cites stronger regulation and improved safety efforts from toy manufacturers and sellers as the reason for the drop. Click through to see the CPSC's full release

The country's leading regulator of everyday consumer items is embroiled in an increasingly nasty ideological battle over the role of government oversight that is being fought on the terrain of toys, cribs and other products.

With the Consumer Product Safety Commission split along party lines following the recent departure of Democrat Thomas Moore after 16 years on the board, the partisan paralysis that has crippled Washington's ability to balance its budget and fix the economy now threatens to spread to the more prosaic business of government: assuring that roughly 15,000 products are reasonably safe to use.

With the deadline for mandatory third party lead testing less than two months away, now would be a very good time to take a closer look at the third-party test reports in your files.

Budget cuts, trademark infringement, and bears, oh my!

OK, OK, no bears.