You’d be hard pressed to find someone who wouldn’t welcome a shortcut to better health and a trimmer physique. For the past few years, several different companies have marketed shoes to help women, men, and even children, more quickly drop pounds and gain muscle.
You won’t see such claims any more, says the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).
Reebok has just settled – for $25 million dollars – with the FTC over what they claim were unsubstantiated claims of benefits. Reebok made very specific product promises, claiming that their line of their toning sneakers would produce 28% more muscle tone in the glutes and 11% more muscle tone in the calf and hamstrings than regular sneakers (see the ad below).
Other brands who might soon follow suit include Sketchers and New Balance, both of which are currently under investigation or part of class-action lawsuits over false benefit claims and injuries. The Consumer Produce Safety Commission (CPSC) has more than 36 complaints in its database, ranging from reports of stress fractures to pain. While a $25 million dollar settlement might seem like a big deal, the toning shoe industry raked in about $1 billion last year alone and Reebok spent more than $40 million advertising the shoes benefits since the beginning of 2010
If you bought Reebok toning shoes or EasyTone apparel on or after December 5, 2008, you are eligible for refunds. For more information about the settlement and to submit your claim, visit http://www.reeboksettlement.com/ftc.
Teresa Green recently joined The National Consumers League as the Linda Golodner Food Safety and Nutrition Fellow. In her role, Teresa deals with a broad array of food issues including food labeling, truth in advertising, alcohol, child nutrition, food fraud and food safety.
By Teresa Green, Linda Golodner Food Safety and Nutrition Fellow
In the midst of a serious outbreak of Listeria, which has killed at least 13 people and left more than 70 others seriously ill, Presidential candidate Michele Bachmann visited a meat packing plant and called for fewer government regulations on the food industry. “We want to have safety,” Ms. Bachmann said, “but at the same time we want to have some common sense.” When it comes to foodborne illnesses, safety and common sense is often the same thing: government oversight helps ensure a safer food supply.
While some in the industry claim that regulations stifle growth, a powerful argument at a time when many Americans are struggling to find work, the truth is much more complicated. The cost of food recalls is high, averaging around $5 million. The resulting loss of consumer confidence in a brand can be equally devastating, not just to the brand in question, but to the whole food industry. Strict food safety rules will never create a perfect system, but they can ensure that as few outbreaks as possible occur.
Enter the FDA Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA), which was signed into law by President Obama on January 4, 2011. In the face of a globalized and increasingly technological food supply, FSMA provides a much-needed modernization of the food safety system in this country by shifting the emphasis away from responding to foodborne illness outbreaks. It does this by focusing on enhanced partnerships, import safety, prevention, and inspections, compliance and response. This means that the FDA will have greater authority to force a company to issue a recall and will be better able to trace an outbreak back to its source.
FSMA is good news for American consumers. When it is fully implemented, we will have a new food safety system that focuses on the prevention of, rather than the response to, foodborne pathogens. This approach will mean a safer food supply and, as a result, fewer sick Americans. Sounds like common sense to me.
By Michell K. McIntyre, Project Director, NCL’s Special Project on Wage Theft
Instead of calling for a vote or hearing on President Obama’s Jobs Plan, we are disappointed that the House Committee on Education & the Workforce chose to hold the fourth partisan hearing last week that focused on weakening the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), a federal agency tasked with maintaining balance and promoting collective bargaining between workers and employers.
The GOP majority in the House Committee on Education & the Workforce seems decidedly pro-employer and anti-regulation, to the detriment of American workers. Congressman Trey Gowdy (R-SC) has been an especially vocal and partisan critic of NLRB, especially the NLRB ruling against Boeing for moving its factory from Washington to South Carolina.
As President Obama recently noted, we have 14 months until the next election and Americans can’t wait that long for Congress to do something. It’s time to stop promoting corporate profits alone and focus on ensuring the safety and prosperity of American workers.
The House Committee majority seems to take issue with all of NLRB’s rulings, even the most seemingly benign. For example, the NLRB recently issued a requirement that businesses post a free notice outlining the basic rights and responsibilities of workers and employers under the National Labor Relations Act—and critics responded by accusing NLRB of “over-reaching.”
“The president unveiled his jobs bill two weeks ago and it was introduced in Congress this week by Congressman Larson. Yet we’re here talking about a poster,” said Congressman Rob Andrews (D-NJ).
As outgoing NLRB Chairman Wilma Liebman noted in a recent NY Times article, the goal of the NLRB is still a sound one: to “further the policy of this statute, which is to further the practice of collective bargaining, obviously collective bargaining freely chosen.” Liebman concluded: “Some say collective bargaining is antithetical to the economy. I don’t buy that at all. This was a statute that worked. It created the middle class. It created good jobs.”
In an effort to start the conversation on the President’s Job Plan, ranking minority member Congressman George Miller (D-CA) announced the creation of an eForum on Jobs and has invited Americans to submit their stories about how the recession and economic downturn has affected their lives. The eForum on Jobs will initially run until Monday, October 3 and concentrate on gathering stories from the public on education, construction, and long-term unemployment, with selected stories to be published on the Democratic committee’s website.
I spent yesterday morning at the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) listening to a report from the Commission’s staff on Table Saw Blade Contact Injuries – this is the culmination of many years of study and deliberation and even a favorable vote toward a mandatory safety standard in 2006 that never materialized. Table saws are inherently dangerous devices to anyone who comes within 10 feet of one. A blade spins on a table at 100 mph and cuts through thick pieces of wood, even metal. Even watching the saw in action is scary, knowing what it can do to fingers or hands upon contact is even worse.
But table saws are a staple in any woodshop, no woodworker can operate efficiently without one. And these saws are also among the most dangerous devices, inflicting nearly 67,300 injuries a year, half of which land victims in the emergency room. Many of the injuries are severe and cause lifelong pain and trauma – amputations from table saws occur 10 times a day, according to CPSC data.
However, today we have a technology, invented by Oregon scientist and patent lawyer Steve Gass, that all but removes the danger of table saws. It operates with a sensor that can distinguish between human flesh and a piece of wood, stopping the blade in a millisecond and preventing injury when it senses flesh. The company Gass runs – which now makes table saws because no manufacturer would license his technology back in 2001 or 2002 when he first developed the prototype – is called SawStop. 30,000 SawStop saws are in operation today, many in shop classes and cabinetry workshops.
The CPSC staff – which is made up of lawyers, scientists, engineers, actuaries, statisticians, and human factor experts – gathered all the relevant information in order to brief the five CPSC commissioners and make a recommendation that the commission move forward with an Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking. That’s the first of three steps – the last of which would be a final rule or regulation requiring safe table saws.
The fact that the CPSC has moved forward on its own – without being specifically required to do so by congress –is unusual in itself. What’s even more unusual, though, is that there is a near total fix to a major safety hazard – one that causes 40,000 plus injuries a year. NCL wrote a letter in November to the Commissioners asking them to adopt a mandatory safety standard with this flesh detecting technology. NCL has been front and center in pushing the CPSC to jumpstart an otherwise dormant process.
Finally, one of the most hopeful signs that we will get an effective safety standard were the comments by Republican appointee, Commissioner Anne Northup, at yesterday’s presentation. No liberal, Northrup had this to say about the proposed ANPR and possible federal safety standard: “Thanks for putting this on the agenda. I’ve wanted this on the agenda for a long time. If you’ve ever known anyone who was injured by a table saw, it’s debilitating and expensive to treat. This is the kind of work I came to the Commission to do.”
We are hoping that within a year – give or take – we might well have a new mandatory safety standard from the CPSC, requiring flesh detecting technology, perhaps starting with the larger saws and eventually required on all of them. The CPSC was established to address just this type of hazard. We are pleased to see them moving forward so decisively.
A new study reveals that doctors’ fees and salaries – especially those of medical specialists – in the United States are much higher than they are in other western countries. That actually shouldn’t come as a surprise. As Atul Gawende has written in a New Yorker magazine piece entitled “The Cost Conundrum,” a fee-for-service system of health care means that doctors get paid per procedure, so the more procedures they do, the more they get paid. There’s every incentive, then, for them to recommend medical procedures even when they may not be needed.
What surprised me about this study, done by Columbia University professor Sherry A. Glied (who now works for HHS), and one of her Columbia colleagues, was that the average orthopedic surgeon in the United States earns an average of $442,450! That means figuring in all of the doctors across the country, in expensive and less expensive communities, that’s the average. That’s a lot of money to earn in one year. In other countries, the average for orthopedic surgeons is more like $210,000.
Even American primary care doctors earn 1/3 more than their counterparts in places like Australia, Canada, France, Germany, and the UK. The study concludes that the inflated cost of physician salaries in the United States is driving up the cost of health care without corresponding benefits to patients overall health.
I respect and admire doctors, and I understand that they are highly trained professionals who save lives and that most are deeply committed to their patients. But the payment model of fee-for-service for doctors must not be exempt from scrutiny as we seek to reduce the cost of health care in the United States.
By Reid Maki, Child Labor Coalition Coordinator and NCL Director of Social Responsibility and Fair Labor Standards
It’s not every day that you get your message through to one of the world’s most notorious dictators, but some of us in the child labor advocacy community think we may have just done that last week during New York City’s Fashion Week.
For several years, the Child Labor Coalition, 28 organizations working to end the labor exploitation of children around the world, has been deeply concerned about the forced use of child labor in Uzbekistan, where Islam Karimov has ruled with an iron fist for 21 years. Each fall, Uzbek school children and their teachers are forced to leave their classrooms and perform arduous hand-harvesting of cotton for up to two months. The children—estimates of their numbers range from several hundred thousand to almost two million—receive little or no pay and often perform this back-breaking work from young childhood and through college. The workers are charged for shelter and food and by the time those expenses are deducted their compensation is so small it would be fair to say they worked for little or no pay or “slave wages.” The profits of this labor tend to flow to Uzbekistan’s ruling elite. Unlike child labor in most countries, Uzbekistan’s occurs as a result of national policy filtered down to local government authorities.
Recently, members of the Cotton Advocacy Network and the Child Labor Coalition, led by the International Labor Rights Forum and other CLC members like the American Federation of Teachers and the Human Rights Watch highlighted this issue by targeting advocacy at Karimov’s daughter Gulnara, who in addition to being Uzbekistan’s ambassador to Spain is a fashion designer who was participating in Fashion Week, where designers from around the world hold shows to reveal their new clothing lines.
Since Gulnara Karimov has bragged about the use of “high quality” Uzbek cotton and is a member of Karimov government, the advocacy community felt that she could fairly be used as an advocacy target.
As ILRF and the Cotton Advocacy Network planned its protest, IMG, Fashion Week’s organizer, washed its hands of Gulnara’s controversial show by cancelling it. Gulnara then moved her fashion show to the stylish Manhattan restaurant Cipriani on 42nd Street for a private show on September 15th. About two dozen of us followed the show to let attendees know about Uzbekistan’s child labor problem. It appears that our efforts scared away Gulnara, who according to media reports, was nowhere to be found.
We shouted things like “Hey, hey, ho, ho—Child Labor’s got to go” and “Uzbek cotton is mighty rotten.” We were joined by several Uzbek nationals, including one who had been forced to work in the fields himself as a child. Another Uzbek man said his daughter is a college student in Uzbekistan and that she is forced to harvest cotton every afternoon. He told a reporter from the Guardian that “it is back-breaking work, very, very hard, and most children have to work from sunrise to sunset every day until the harvest is finished. No weekends, nothing, for two or three months.” One protestor, an American woman from Connecticut, carried a sign that said, “Free Abdul,” who she explained was an Uzbek exchange student that she hosted who has subsequently been jailed by the Karimov regime as a political prisoner. Photos of the rally can be found here.
We handed out hundreds of leaflets and our protest received wide coverage about a dozen journalistic organizations including the New York Post, and Britain’s Guardian newspaper.
Members of the CLC conducted a similar protest outside the Embassy of Uzbekistan in 2009. At that time, some of us wondered if word of the protest would filter up to Karimov. With the ouster of his daughter from Fashion Week, we’re pretty sure Islam Karimov got the news this time.
If you would like clothing retailers to know about your concerns regarding Uzbek cotton, please consider adding your name to this Change.org petition (one of several targeting specific retail chains).
$25 for one checked bag? Another $20 to choose your seat? Is it any wonder that the airline industry consistently scores the lowest in consumer satisfaction surveys? Earlier this summer, the American Customer Satisfaction index reported that, out of the 47 industries evaluated, airlines tied newspapers for the lowest-satisfaction rating, and airline satisfaction only continues to spiral downward.
The airline industry’s actions over the past few months will do nothing to improve consumer confidence. When the government failed to reauthorize the FAA in July, several federal taxes were discontinued, which could have meant a 15-percent break on airfare for passengers. Instead of passing the money saved from the tax holiday on to consumers, most airlines actually raised prices–allowing them to collect nearly $70 million a day, almost $500 million in total, before the FAA’s taxing authority was reinstated.
NCL, along with a coalition of consumer interest groups, condemned airline executives in a letter to the CEO of the Air Transport Association for their greed and lack of transparency in ticketing fees.
If airlines continue to exhibit this type of anti-consumer behavior, it’s a fair bet that the industry can expect a permanent spot on the bottom of the consumer satisfaction scale.
By John Breyault, NCL Vice President of Public Policy, Telecommunications and Fraud
As kids head back to school this time of year, parents will undoubtedly soon be deluged with requests to buy cell phones for their children. Research shows that children are having these wishes fulfilled at progressively earlier ages, as well.
For example, a 2009 Pew Internet and American Life Project survey found that 5 percent of 16-year-olds say they received their first cell phone at age 11 or before. Conversely, 57 percent of 12-year-olds say they received their first cell phone at age 11 or before.
The complaints of family blogger Carol Brooks Ball mentioned recently are typical when it comes to parents’ headaches surrounding their tweens’ first phones:
“Both of my children have cell phones. And both phones, in my mind, were purchased for the sole purpose of keeping in touch. With me.
Them, not so much. To them, their cell phones serve the purpose of allowing virtually-constant contact with friends.
…
When I first got the kids their cell phones – when they were both ‘tweens’ – I learned the hard way about the cost of going over the wireless plan’s small monthly allotment for text messaging. My daughter quickly burned through the texting limit (my son wasn’t, and still isn’t, much of a texter; if I send him a text message, he calls me back).
While I soon set limits for my daughter due to her texting proclivities, I also quietly signed up for unlimited texting through my wireless carrier. But, how great it would have been to have had some objective guidance on the subject at the time.”
It’s for parents like Carol that NCL, through an educational grant from TracFone Wireless, has produced a new consumer guide for parents of tweens getting their child’s first cell phones.
When considering a tween’s first cell phone, parents have a number of important considerations to keep I mind. For example, an older teenager is likely to be using their phone to stay in touch while at an after-school job. On the other hand, a tween is less likely to be roaming far from home on their own, needing a phone only to call Mom for a ride home from soccer practice.
Older teens are more likely to be riding in cars with other teens, so a serious discussion about texting-while-driving will likely be in the cards. Pre-teens probably won’t find themselves without an adult in a car, but they do take their phones with them while on two wheels, so texting-while-biking should be a topic of discussion. Tweens also may not have had as much practice in taking care of their own personal (and expensive!) electronics as older teens.
To help parents with these and other issues, NCL’s new guide contains a wealth of tips for parents for figuring out why (or even if) your tween needs a cell phone, sorting through the vast universe of handsets and service plans and setting “rules of the road” for responsible use.
The pencils are sharpened, the new tennis shoes are squeezing the toes, and students across the country are primed to learn about consumer issues and tackle NCL’s competition about real-life: LifeSmarts.
LifeSmarts introduces middle school and high school students to real-world knowledge they can use now. We quiz them about workers’ rights, managing money, eating well, using technology, and much more.
Students may begin competing today! Students can practice using the vast array of consumer resources available at lifesmarts.org, including practice quizzes.
Highlights at lifesmarts.org include:
TeamSmarts: Monthly 100-question quizzes focus on one topic area. Teams of students can work together and test their smarts against other teams from across the country. Prizes go to the top LifeSmarts and FCCLA teams each month. To warm up, try the practice quiz first (password: practice)
By Michell K. McIntyre, Project Director, NCL’s Special Project on Wage Theft
In a time when the union rights of public employees are under constant attack, when school teachers have to fight for their healthcare benefits and public works jobs are being slashed, we need to remember the time, sacrifice and importance of work these employees do. On the tenth anniversary of 9/11, we remember and honor the ones we lost, the ones who survived and the ones fighting to bring those responsible to justice. We also need to remember those ‘invisible’ workers who answered the call and did what they could on that awful day and the days following.
Greg Sargent, of the Washington Post’s Plum Line, wrote, “Dozens upon dozens of workers responded to the disaster with real grit and heroism, undertaking the grueling task of cleaning up the mess, digging through the rubble for the injured and the dead, sometimes searching for their own colleagues and friends, for days and days on end, under unspeakably stressful and wrenching conditions.”
AFSCME, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, has created a video that highlights the work public employees did on that day at Ground Zero. It captures something fundamental about 9/11 that’s been mostly forgotten:
“We were digging by hand,” recalls Patrick Bahnken, an emergency medical technician with the D.C. 37 Local 2507. “You’re talking 200 plus story buildings, and we’re digging it out by hand. And I knew that a large number of people that I’d be carrying out or looking for or trying to help, were people that I knew. And that made it very difficult. But again, you’re committed to going for those who would have come for you.”
“They wanted to do their job,” recalls Halloveen Brightly, a police communications specialist with the D.C. 37 Local 1549. “I mean, really wanted to go there and help those people. And you can hear it. I think we worked together really well that day. I hope that whatever they needed from me at that last time, I gave it to them. That’s all.”
According to AFSCME, some 343 firefighters and 60 police officers died as a result of 9/11 and many thousands more remain sick from respiratory ailments attributed to the disaster.
It’s time to stop the attacks on public employees. It’s time to start remembering and honoring the fundamental work these public employees do everyday.
By Mimi Johnson, NCL Director of Health Policy
