The Sleeping Bag Loophole
Posted by SCapozzola on July 27th, 2010
As Russell Hubbard reports in the Birmingham News, a “loophole” in U.S. trade law is helping imported sleeping bags overtake domestic producers.
The Generalized System of Preferences, a program authorized by Congress in 2006, allows certain products from developing nations to be imported free of tariffs. Apparently sleeping bags don’t qualify as a textile or related product, and so companies in Bangladesh are sending tariff-free sleeping bags into the U.S.
The result: Exxel Outdoors, which says it operates the last U.S. factory producing mass-market sleeping bags, is losing market share. Orders are dropping and plans to hire new workers have fallen by the wayside.
Exxel has been manufacturing 2 million sleeping bags per year, and sales of those sleeping bags have been providing a good living for more than 10 years for about 65 workers in Winston County, Alabama, where unemployment has been hovering at about 15% recently.
Now, however, the future is in doubt.
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