Chinese Manufacturing

Like many of you probably have, I have been following the news about pollution and improper manufacturing standards in China pretty closely. The latest is a recall from Mattel, which includes recalls for Barbie sets among others. If you don't have the time to read it, basically, all that I got from it was that "it wasn't our fault" that you typically get from publicly traded corporations in this sort of situation. Mattel owns and runs several manufacturing plants in China, but they also contract out some manufacturing to some other companies -- Holder Plastic Company and Apex Manufacturing Company were mentioned in the article -- who not only do the manufacturing, but will also contract out a portion of their work to yet another company (the subcontractor). This is all pretty common out in the business world, but should it be? Of course the end line subcontractor takes the blame, as they were the ones that messed up. But I would argue that it is the job of the parent company to ensure that the contractors are doing things properly. In this case how could Mattel really conduct proper quality control over more than one degree of separation. Basically, Mattel is rightfully taking heat over this and losing money. The bad thing is that they are deflecting blame, when it is every bit as much a failure of their system as anyone else's. A company should be confident and 100% sure of what they are bringing forward to the retail environment and ultimately the end consumer. Mattel did not have that level of control obviously, and they are paying for it. The only way for them to take that control back would be to pull everything back in house (which is how things used to be done anyway), and then even start manufacturing domestically again. We all know they used to do everything in house and on US soil in the past, but now everything is contracted out and done internationally. Why waste all that energy to bring it all the way back here to sell, and why put the financial future of your company in the hands of a foreign contractor? I am hardly an isolationist, but I do have a problem with wasting energy on bringing a product across an ocean that could have just as easily been sourced and manufactured close-by. We all know WHY they want to manufacture in China, the labor is cheap... but there is also the little tidbit of information that they leave out about how they have little or no environmental limitations there. They can pollute all they want there and save the cost that they would have to take on if manufacturing in Europe or the US. We fought very hard for environmental legislation as well as fair labor laws in this country, only to have all the corporations just pick up and move somewhere else so they could continue using near slave labor and destroy the earth. The only solution I have found for myself is to stop buying products made in China, but do you realize how difficult that is? There is no simple solution really, but never underestimate the combined power of the American consumer. If we stop buying so many products made in China, it will most assuredly be felt and addressed.