FAIR PACKAGING AND LABELING

TUESDAY, MAY 4, 1965

U.S. SENATE,

COMMITTEE ON COMMERCE,

Washington, D.C.

The committee met at 9:05 a.m., in room 5110, New Senate Office Building, the Hon. Frank J. Lausche presiding.

Senator LAUSCHE. The committee will come to order. We will continue hearing witnesses on S. 985.

The first witness to testify this morning will be Miss Evelyn Dubrow, chairman of the Subcommittee on Consumers Legislation, accompanied by Miss Ann Draper, Research Department, American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations.

STATEMENT OF EVELYN DUBROW, CHAIRMAN, SUBCOMMITTEE ON CONSUMERS LEGISLATION; ACCOMPANIED BY ANN DRAPER, RESEARCH DEPARTMENT, AMERICAN FEDERATION OF LABOR AND CONGRESS OF INDUSTRIAL ORGANIZATIONS, WASHINGTON, D.C.

Miss DUBROW. Good morning, Mr. Chairman.

My name is Evelyn Dubrow. I am legislative representative for the International Ladies' Garment Workers Union. I am also chairman of the consumer subcommittee of the National Legislative Council of the AFL-CIO, and I am appearing today on behalf of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations.

The AFL-CIO represents its 132 million trade union members and their families not only with respect to their direct interests in their jobs, but in matters that involve their general welfare. None is more closely linked to their daily lives than the problems they face as shoppers and buyers in the Nation's consumer markets. Wages earned on the job go directly to the purchase of goods and services for the household. Organized labor has a genuine stake in the wellbeing of its members as consumers as well as producers.

Since the beginning of the investigations initiated by the Senate Antitrust and Monopoly Subcommittee in 1961, the AFL-CIO has taken a keen interest in what might be done through reform legislation to improve packaging practices from a consumer point of view. The committee investigations led to specific proposals embodied in a series of bills, chiefly sponsored by Senator Hart: S. 3745 in the 87th Congress; S. 387 in the 88th Congress, and S. 985 in the current Congress.

The AFL-CIO has specifically endorsed the legislation proposed by Senator Hart. I quote from a policy resolution passed by the most recent constitutional convention of the AFL-CIO, in 1963:

We urge the early congressional approval of Senator Hart's truth-in-packaging measure which demands no more than integrity from the packaging industry. This is not too high a price for the privilege of doing business with the American public.

The truth-in-packaging bill then pending was S. 387. The current bill offered by Senator Hart is S. 985, which contains substantially the same provisions. S. 985 represents the culmination of 4 years of hearings and debate. It also has our support. However, as I will indicate as I go along, we have some reservations about some of the changes made in its terms since the last Congress, and hope the committee will consider certain improvements.

Basically the bill is designed simply to give the ordinary retail buyer a fair shake in today's markets and supermarkets, in which the packaged product is now so predominant. Most of the 8,000 or more items in the modern supermarket come in packages, and the buyer's main information about a product before a purchase is actually made must now be gleaned from the package itself.

Unfortunately, as the previous voluminous hearings have brought out, the modern package too often falls down on this basic information job. It is strong on sales messages and weak on plain facts like just exactly what is inside and how much of it. And you can't carry on a conversation with a package in order to make it speak up clearly about what you want to know.

S. 985 makes it mandatory upon the Food and Drug Administration and the Federal Trade Commission, for the products within their respective jurisdictions, to draw up a set of rules covering what information must be displayed on a package, and what kind of misinformation is forbidden. These mandatory provisions are listed in section 3(a). Net quantity of contents must appear on front panels of packages, and standards must be established as to how big the type should be. Sales pitches that puff up the quantity statements such as the jumbo quart or the full quart or the big 12 ounces-are banned.

Also forbidden are manufacturers' messages, incorporated into the printed labels, that offer cents off the regular price, or that promise that a large package will cost less than a small one.

We are all in favor of reduced prices-if they are really reduced; and we gladly accept the offer of lower unit prices on larger sizesif they are really lower. But as any shopper can testify, the most applicable description of these bargains, though it may have grammatical shortcomings, is the line from Porgy and Bess: "It ain't necessarily so."

To evaluate the cents-off claim, a shopper must know from previous purchases what the regular price really is. To evaluate the unit price of the large economy size-for reasons I will shortly discuss the shopper must have a thorough knowledge of ratio and proportion, the ability to multiply and divide fractions and the time and patience to apply these talents in the aisles of the supermarket. I submit that this kind of gimmickry is an unjustified imposition on consumers.

Finally, section 3(a) calls for regulations prohibiting pictures on packages which are likely to deceive buyers about what is inside.

Considering that buyers can't open the packages prior to purchase, this seems eminently fair and sensible.

We can see no substantive objections to any of the provisions of section 3(a). They are elementary and needed requirements for the assurance of fair dealing with the public. We urge that they be retained on the mandatory basis presently provided by the bill.

Section 3(c) of the bill deals with other packaging abuses that go beyond the rudiments covered by section 3(a). Under this section, remedial regulations are required only if there is a finding that they are necessary to enable consumers to make rational comparisons between competing products or to prevent the deception of consumers. The proliferation of packages in recent years has played havoc with our traditional system of weights and measures. The package itself has tended to become the unit of measure usurping the function of ounces, pounds, pints, and quarts or at any rate, making these oldfashioned standards more and more difficult to use. The record of hearings before the Antitrust and Monopoly Subcommittee is full of examples of quantity variations among packages of competing products, extending to the use of fractional measures that have no practical basis whatever, except-if this can be called practical-to make it almost impossible for a shopper to make price comparisons between products or among different sized packages of the same product.

Which is the beter buy? Two 634-ounce cans of tunafish for 63 cents or one 914 ounce can for 43 cents? And this is a simple exercise compared to those presented by soap powders and cereals.

In today's market, the plain ordinary pound has frequently shrunk to 151⁄2 ounces, the half pound to 734 or 712 ounces.

Who but the most sharp-eyed of housewives will notice that the new jar of baby food, selling at the same price as the old, contains only 611⁄2 ounces of applesauce instead of 634 ounces?

One weights-and-measures official testified in previous hearings that potato chip packages come in 74 different sizes.

The cure for this chaos is found in section 3 (c) which authorizes regulations to establish reasonable weights and quantities in which particular commodities shall be distributed for retail sale. We support this provision as contained in the bill. We do not, however, see the absolute necessity for a blanket exemption applying to amounts of 2 ounces or less. We think the merits of such an exemption should be considered at the time any specific regulation is under consideration. The jungle of competing quantity units in which packages are sold has aggravated another problem with which section 3 (c) deals that is, the use of deceptive sizes, shapes and proportions to exaggerate the quantity inside.

Plainly marked, front-panel quantity statements plus the establishment of reasonable weights and quantities for particular product lines would tend to curb the worst of these abuses, but we believe the regulatory authority should be retained in the bill. It would certainly be necessary where quantities of less than 2 ounces are involved, if they are to be exempted from any quantity standardization whatever. Deception comes in small packages as well as large. An example brought to our attention was a plastic jar that looked as if it would hold two ounces of hair pomade but thanks to hollow sides and a hollow bottom actually held only 1 ounce.

We raise, in a more tentative way, a question about the specific exemption for package shapes which have been designed to exploit the unique advantages of any material for use in the production of packages of distinctive appearance. We are not really sure what this means. If it refers only to such things as the children's bathtub soaps that are packaged in forms ranging from fireengines to Frankenstein monsters, we have no objection as long as the quantity within is clearly indicated. However, care must be taken that an innocently intended exemption doesn't become a gaping loophole.

Section 3(c) contains other provisions of definite assistance to consumers. These include the establishment of new standards for quantity designations where ordinary statements of weight, measure, or count are not meaningful; and a pinning down of what the term serving means. Also some common agreement is contemplated on the meaning of descriptive size designations such as small, medium, large, jumbo, kingsize, and so forth.

In addition, section 3 (c) provides for the disclosure of information on packages as to ingredients and composition of the contents. We are sorry to see, however, that this provision now includes a blanket exemption for proprietary trade secrets. We believe that where a possibility of injury to users is involved in the presence of certain ingredients, a trade secrets provision is contrary to the public interest. We are thinking specifically of cosmetics. The present Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act neither requires cosmetics to be pretested for safety before they are released to the consumer market, nor does it require any listing of ingredients on cosmetic labels or packages. We therefore urge that at the very least, the trade secrets exemption be made inapplicable where a question of consumer health or safety is involved. With the reservations noted above, we believe this bill is fair to consumers, fair to business, and fair to labor.

We see no validity in the dire predictions of some opponents of this bill to the effect that it will stifle ingenuity and innovation in packaging techniques; increase costs to the consumers; reduce sales; curtail production; cause unemployment, and lead to Government controls over prices, wages, production, and distribution. The very extravagance of these protests exposes their absurdity.

We cannot believe that bamboozling the consumer is the only way in which free competitive enterprise, job security for workers, and a prosperous economy can be maintained. On the contrary, this bill is designed to stimulate honest competition on the basis of quality and price, and to increase the consumer's real purchasing power by enabling him to make rational choices more easily. And there is nothing in this bill that says that packages may not be as attractive, convenient, and distinctive as imagination can make them. Is the faculty of imagination so poor that it can operate only in the realm of deception and confusion?

Curiously enough, opponents of this bill who predict the direst results also insist that present laws in the packaging and labeling field could acomplish the same objectives if only they were properly enforced. If the objectives of this bill are so dangerous, why plead for better enforcement of existing laws having the same objectives?

The answer is, of course, that present laws are not adequate in this field. Their deficiencies have been well set forth in the majority report