Flammable Clothing Problem in America Is One Essay

flammable clothing problem in America is one that has plagued the industry for several decades. The federal agency responsible for the creating standards and compiling statistics relative to fires and clothing in the United States is the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) (Consumer Product Safety Act). In the late 1970's the CPSC, after several difficult years in which there were some tragic injuries resulting from children being burned by flammable clothing, made the enactment of stronger regulations on children's clothing, particularly pajamas, a priority. One of the results of this intensified effort was the implementation of the Children's Sleepwear Standards in 1972 by the U.S. Department of Commerce. The regulations regarding children's sleepwear were incorporated with several other regulations but the other regulations were eventually abandoned under extreme pressure from the textile and retail industries and only the children sleepwear provisions continued to be enforced (Knudson).

The history of regulation in the clothing industry relative to flammable fabrics began in 1953 with the enactment of the Flammable Fabrics Act. This 1953 Act eliminated the manufacture, sale, offering for sale, or sale of any kind of article or wearing apparel that was "so highly flammable as to be dangerous when worn by individuals (Flammable Fabrics Act)." The 1953 Act arose from a series of accidents involving children wearing long rayon pile cowboy chaps or brushed rayon sweaters. The 1953 Act was applied as written that year with little modification until 1963 when a proposal was made to extend the regulations to cover infants' receiving blankets and bedding.Like they had earlier, the textile and retail industry openly opposed this extension and, as a result, the regulations that were added were of little practical value. Late in the 60's decade, several different organizations concerned with the safety of children's clothing began to express concerns that the standards that were existence were simply inadequate and that, in fact, were causing more problems than cures in that they were imprecise and misleading as to the measure of inflammability. Experts in the field believed that the public was under the mistaken belief that manufactured children's clothing was free from the dangers of flammability. Finally, in 1970, the Department of Commerce instituted proceedings relating to children's apparel (Robertson). The results of the Commerce Department's study were the following recommendations as to a proposed flammability standard:

1. Needed to adequately protect the public against unreasonable risk of the occurrence of fire leading to death, injury, or significant property damage;

2. Reasonable, technologically practical, and appropriate; and

3. Limited to such fabrics, related materials, or products which would have been determined to present such unreasonable risks.

As had been the case on all prior occasions when attempts to regulate the flammability of clothing had became an issue, the textile and retail industries offered aggressive arguments in opposition to any new or additional regulations. At the core of their arguments was that their products were safe and that the public would not pay for the cost of any new protection even….....