This is one of the problems with current legislation (CAN SPAM). My understanding is that individuals don’t have standing to sue, but instead all they can do is report issues to the government and hope they do something about it.
Company With $8.7B in Yearly Sales Pays $3.18M Marketing Fee Covering Several Products for The Last Four Years, Will Report As "Misc Expenses" In Quarterly Report
I think in a more fair world, they should be forced to recall all falsely labeled "Made In USA" products and offer to replace them with real products made in the USA.
In a more fair world, corporations would go to jail (cease all operations for set number of years) just like the humans they share free speech rights with
See, that's the secret, because if you call them "Legal Expenses" you will definitely wind up on trial in the Supreme Court of the State of New York. Misc can cover a lot of things.
> It's interesting to question, however, if U.S.-made labels have at all contributed to the company's success.
The article did follow up the total sales number with this caveat though. It seems reasonable that the products could have accounted for more than $3.18M in sales, though we really don't know total sales of the falsely labeled products or what percent of those sales only happened due to the Made in the USA label.
Since this is the second time this has happened, I kind of feel like subsequent offenses need to grow exponentially, like 3x for each new fine. That would make the next fine $9M, than $27M, then $91M etc.
I think that would avoid the fine just becoming an extra tax.
The Sapian MADE IN USA scam was even worse as it both evaded taxes and misrepresented the country of origin by shipping stuff through the Northern Mariana Islands.
Any lawyers here able to explain why the fine is negligible? Feels like a complete joke, encouraging dishonesty as the winning strategy in business. Are judges scared they'll be assassinated or something? Do we need to anonymize them?
To know if fine is disproportionately small you need to know the volume of sales of the mislabeled goods. If they sold only $500k of goods, then fine is unreasonably large, for example.
I don't know the sales volume, but this fine is for, if I read correctly, seven products. WS has roughly 15,000 products across its brands. So the fine may be in the ballpark of one year's sales, which would be about 5.5x their profit on those sales. But that assumes these products' revenue and margins are proportionate to the rest of them.
This always bugged me about Harley Davidson, because only around 70 to 80% of the parts are made in America. Most of Harley-Davidson's sold across the globe are made outside of America. Yet.. it's "Made in America" when in fact it's just assembled here. Always felt that was dishonest but IIRC they use a special loophole
Almost no vehicle manufacturers make all their own parts, and vetting the source of every part to make sure also were all made in the states would just mean that some parts are unavailable.
Also, its important to think of the other side of the made in the U.S.A. label which was to bring foreign manufacturers to the states for our market. Think Honda and Toyota. Getting the majority of the parts made here and the assembly here was a major benefit to those areas it affected compared to having that all happen in Japan. If you required 100% or close to it, would that have even happened?
There are both positives and negatives to the current system, but in a global market I'm not sure it's sane to expect complex products with many parts to have a single national origin.
To do this right you'd have to set up something like a VAT style system where each vendor in the tree specifies how much of the value of their product was produced in the US. Otherwise the obvious incentive is to import the largest subassemblies you can, with perfunctory final assembly in the US.
Then again this would give foreign made products a running start (Amazon Chineseum that's 3x the cost of Aliexpress - 70% made in the US!), and it would probably be only that last 20-30% that actually resulted in domestic blue collar jobs which are the ostensible desire of such labeling.
Nobody is "expecting complex products with many parts to have a single origin." And normally I'd agree that Made In the USA is diet xenophobia, but Harley specifically, and heavily, lean into being "made in the USA" - as do their owners, and certain politicians who introduced tariffs (and caused retaliatory tariffs in the EU. Which Harley sidestepped by, drumroll please...opening assembly plants in southeast Asia!)
Some engine components, some drivetrain components, all the electricals, all the suspension, and wheels are all made outside the US. That leaves the frame/body panels and some engine/drivetrain components as the only stuff sourced in the US - and yes, the engine/bike assembled in the US.
If 4 out of 5 parts were made in the country, and the bike was assembled in the country, it does not bother me to claim the bike is made in the USA. For a complex assembly with hundreds or thousand of pieces, there's some wiggle room, and 70-80% is close enough that I wouldn't feel lied to.
On the other hand, if I bought a wooden spoon, or even a saucepan, and it said "Made in USA" on it, and I found out that it wasn't 100% made in the USA from materials produced here, I'd feel differently because those are relatively simple products (compared to a motorcycle) where every piece much more crucially defines the whole.
I don't know what the cutoff is, though: a product doesn't have to be 100% USA-made components, but 51% would be too little. Ballpark, 70%+ would be the over-under where I'd start to feel misled.
It's very difficult being a Mechanical Engineer trying to source American parts. America just doesn't have the infrastructure for a lot of things you need. And even when it does, often you find China can do it better, faster, and cheaper. I can get a box of CNC machined parts for $10 each via 2 day DHL for a $200 shipping fee. An America shop would take just as long and charge me a couple hundred bucks for just one. And try finding some niche bearing on mcmaster-carr if you filter by USA, nearly the entire catalog disappears. A global supply chain is just the reality of mass producing machines these days. And imports can only have one Country of Origin so we can't be too detailed on the labels.
I've run into this problem trying to build hardware in the US[1]. There are certain components where it's just not possible to find them in the US. But that is as a start-up.. as a company the size of Harley, they certainly could design and commision them here if they wanted.
What part do you consider to be critical enough in the act of making you call it “made here”? Virtually nothing is wholly made in any one place. Even poetry relies on the paper and pencil industry.
A federal complaint filed by Pratum Farm of Salem, Ore., alleges a new USDA regulation unlawfully favors “foreign agribusiness,” allowing food exporters to aggregate and sell crops as “organic” though only about 2% of their suppliers are “spot checked” by certifiers.
Readit News
Here is the 2020 order it got in trouble over originally: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2020/07/...
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Rules_of_Acquisition
> the company raked in nearly $8.7 billion in sales last year.
The article did follow up the total sales number with this caveat though. It seems reasonable that the products could have accounted for more than $3.18M in sales, though we really don't know total sales of the falsely labeled products or what percent of those sales only happened due to the Made in the USA label.
"Sorry, no refunds."
I think that would avoid the fine just becoming an extra tax.
https://www.bmwe.org/journal/1999/09SEP/b04.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Abramoff_CNMI_scandal
Also, its important to think of the other side of the made in the U.S.A. label which was to bring foreign manufacturers to the states for our market. Think Honda and Toyota. Getting the majority of the parts made here and the assembly here was a major benefit to those areas it affected compared to having that all happen in Japan. If you required 100% or close to it, would that have even happened?
There are both positives and negatives to the current system, but in a global market I'm not sure it's sane to expect complex products with many parts to have a single national origin.
Then again this would give foreign made products a running start (Amazon Chineseum that's 3x the cost of Aliexpress - 70% made in the US!), and it would probably be only that last 20-30% that actually resulted in domestic blue collar jobs which are the ostensible desire of such labeling.
Some engine components, some drivetrain components, all the electricals, all the suspension, and wheels are all made outside the US. That leaves the frame/body panels and some engine/drivetrain components as the only stuff sourced in the US - and yes, the engine/bike assembled in the US.
On the other hand, if I bought a wooden spoon, or even a saucepan, and it said "Made in USA" on it, and I found out that it wasn't 100% made in the USA from materials produced here, I'd feel differently because those are relatively simple products (compared to a motorcycle) where every piece much more crucially defines the whole.
I don't know what the cutoff is, though: a product doesn't have to be 100% USA-made components, but 51% would be too little. Ballpark, 70%+ would be the over-under where I'd start to feel misled.
How about designers not in USA?
It's very difficult being a Mechanical Engineer trying to source American parts. America just doesn't have the infrastructure for a lot of things you need. And even when it does, often you find China can do it better, faster, and cheaper. I can get a box of CNC machined parts for $10 each via 2 day DHL for a $200 shipping fee. An America shop would take just as long and charge me a couple hundred bucks for just one. And try finding some niche bearing on mcmaster-carr if you filter by USA, nearly the entire catalog disappears. A global supply chain is just the reality of mass producing machines these days. And imports can only have one Country of Origin so we can't be too detailed on the labels.
[1] https://www.anomie.tech/articles/making-hardware-in-the-US/
They are allowing foreign farms to label things organic without any controls or checks.