Here’s wishing all of you a safe and happy holiday season, and a prosperous New Year. Even bloggers need time off (though not as much as others), so we expect the blog will fall silent for a spell while we recharge the batteries and get ready for a very busy 2005. If something earth-shattering happens, rest assured the blog will be breaking the news, but if things are quiet, then we’ll stay settled in for our long winter’s nap and see you on the other side.

Happy Holidays, all!

This Christmas, don’t forget the great contribution of manufacturers. We make the cards, the lights, the candy, the toys, the electronics, the gadgets, even the fruitcake from Aunt Nell.

Follow this link to read Marissa Gandelman’s piece about the many contributions of manufacturers to the Holiday Season.

Here’s a sneak preview of our “I Am the NAM” poster campaign that we will roll out at National Manufacturing Week, March 7-10 in Chicago. The brainchild of our own Beth Solomon, it will feature some of our regular ol’ manufacturers, but along the way will begin to rattle people’s perceptions of manufacturers.

To get you started, here’s Kellie and Gary Johnson of Ace Clearwater Enterprises of Torrance, California. Kellie’s an NAM Board Member. Earlier this year Kellie hosted The Governator — Arnold Schwarzenegger — at her plant

Do these folks look like manufacturers to you? We thought all manufracturers looked like Dick Kelch!

This just in today from Common Good — their Second Annual Gatekeeper Awards, honoring “judges whose decisions restore public confidence that reasonable actions will be supported by the courts, even when they result in unintended consequences….”

Follow this link to some very entertaining stuff, including a suit against Cingular for a traffic accident caused by someone talking on their cell phone and a suit against a priest for citing the wrong Scripture in his eulogy. We can’t make this stuff up.

Thanks to the good folks over at the Bureau of National Affairs, here’s the 2005 Calendar of Negotiations, a list of the labor negotiations coming up in 2005. You’ll see in here contracts expiring in state government, health care, telecommunications and even the US Postal Service. Without peeking at the cards, you can bet that health care will loom large as an issue in virtually all of these negotiations.

And, for those of you unlucky enough to be embroiled in any of these, don’t forget “The Negotiation Handbook“, a must-have for any negotiator, makes a lovely gift, too. Please buy them in bulk.

The Question of the Week (below) has sure drummed up a big response, and obviously hit a nerve with manufacturers far & wide. Outpacing the number of comments posted on the blog are the number of e-mails we received from folks requesting anonymity, out of fear of more terror from the trial bar. Among the highlights (or lowlights) are:

– An individual in NY City had walked through a door (without opening it first) and had suffered some level of pain and medical treatment. We were named as a property owner along with others unknown to us. I instructed our attorney to correspond on our behalf and inform the filing attorney for the plaintiff that we were an upstate corporation with a single location, had never owned, leased or maintained a presence in New York City and took exception to being wrongfully named in a legal action. This went on for over a year with numerous letters written and became a small stack of associated paperwork. The matter was ultimately dismissed, although absent proper legal representation, we would have certainly been in trouble by default judgment.

Wrongful suits cause undue time, concern and necessitate legal representation – sort of the full employment action for attorneys. Offending attorneys should be censured or otherwise held accountable for their actions.

– I’ve seen the subject on today’s NAM blog and I did not want to respond publicly on the site.

I am the president of a manufacturing firm that employs over 300 people and we currently have over two dozen product liability suits pending in Madison County, Illinois. For the past (15) years the same plaintiff’s attorney has been suing our company for alleged claims and his persistence, combined with the relatively recent very plaintiff friendly venue, is starting to pay off for him.

I know that the ATRA “hellhole” designations are somewhat “tongue in cheek” and humorous to some. Let me assure you that for a company involved every day with the bias, unfairness, illogic, and injustice that goes on in this in county, there is absolutely nothing funny about the situation.

After (29) years of successfully being in business, we are now struggling for our life due to the unjust accusations and cockeyed legal system. Over 10% of our gross revenues went to defending and/or settling legal claims this year.

I am familiar with NAM and support their work. I pledge my company’s and my personal support to help with this matter in any way. I encourage you to keep fighting the fight to get some sense back into the American legal system before it is too late for all American manufacturers.

– This is an excellent issue. In “Judicial Hellholes” we recognize several jurisdictions from our history of asbestos injury suits. This is a form of “legal extortion” as our products were seldom involved, but we have to pay to get off the cases.

In the spirit of the release of the Judicial Hellhole report (see below), let’s ask, “Have you ever been sued unjustly?”. That is, have you been sued by some enterprising trial lawyer where you were not culpable (but probably ended up paying anyway)? Let’s hear some details. Whenever two or more manufacturers are gathered, we hear some real whoppers. Just click on the “Comment” button below and give it your best shot.

Today, our friends over at the American Tort Reform Association (ATRA) released their annual list of “judicial hellholes”. This is sort of like Blackwell’s annual list of the Worst Dressed, not a list you aspire to be on. According to the ATRA, “A number of factors contribute to a Judicial Hellhole designation, including the prevalence of forum shopping, novel legal theories, and discovery abuse, as well as the certification of class action lawsuits, the proliferation of junk science, contributions to judges and the uneven application of evidentiary rules.” Yeesh — it’s enough to make a trial lawyer salivate!

Among their top 5 are:

– Madison County, Illinois

– St. Clair County, Illinois

– Hampton County, South Carolina

– Jefferson County, Texas and

– Get this — “The Entire State of West Virginia”. Almost heaven — if you’re a trial lawyer.

Hopefully, we are an election closer to tort reform, if we stay focused and keep telling the outrageous tales of overzealous lawyers and miscarriages of justice.

Click here to see a copy of the report.

Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the workplace comes a report from the National Council on Disability entitled, “Righting the ADA”. The 150-page report offers a series of legislative proposals “in an effort to return the ADA to its original course”. Would that it were so.

You might recall the birth of the ADA in 1990, signed into law by President Bush (Sr). Better still, you might recall the aim of the law, i.e., to lower barriers for the disabled, whether structural or legal. Now, some 14 years later, as with so many other statutes, with the help of (who else?) an enterprising trial bar we have wandered far from the original purpose.

Since the passage of the ADA, the participation rate of the disabled in the workforce has declined. Hardly a rousing success. And, the #2 claim under the ADA today is for emotional distress. The #1 claim? By a factor of 3 over the #2 claim, it is for back injuries. Not exactly what we meant, is it? As we like to point out, when this bill was signed into law in the Rose Garden, standing and sitting behind the President were not people with emotional distress and back injuries. Instead, they were people with, well, disabilities.

Manfuacturers have been at the forefront of accommodating the disabled in our workplaces. We have long embraced the spirit of this law (long before it was codified) and we religiously follow the letter of the law today.

We stand shoulder to shoulder with the National Council in its quest for equality for all disabled people. Maybe we can get the lawyers out of it and have a reasonable discussion. In the meantime, let’s not expand the ADA.

This week, the White House has scheduled a conference entitled: “Securing Our Economic Future”, to be held here in Washington on Wednesday and Thursday, December 15-16. This will be similar to the economic conference held earlier in President Bush’s first term in Waco, Texas, although with greater participation by scholars and policy experts. Specific panels will focus on all the issues near and dear to our hearts: tax and regulatory burdens, the cost of lawsuit abuse, the affordability of health care and other issues.

There are a few manufacturers on these panels and our President, John Engler, will be attending most of the conference. Our Policy folks will be attending the parts of the conference that focus on their policy areas.

Here is the full agenda for the two-day meeting.