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SBMA Joins Nationwide Consortium To Reduce Your
Product Liability
Several years ago SBMA was
instrumental in spearheading the authoring and
introduction of the Innocent Sellers Fairness
Act (ISFA) in Washington. The bill was designed
to shield dealers from law suits for their sale
of products that they did not manufacture,
install, modify, or write the specifications.
That is, dealers were innocent of doing anything
but selling the product.
Soon after this bill’s
introduction President Obama took office and the
anti small-business majority of both the Senate
and the House became obligated to protect the
trial lawyers and the unions in our country.
Legislation like ISFA that was designed to
protect small businesses from unfair and
unnecessary litigation has since had very little
chance for passage.
Our dealers are now subject to a
myriad of new regulations and business burdens
and the list grows daily: lead paint rules, Red
Flag credit rules, OSHA inspections, labor law
concerns, boom truck regulations and, of course,
the subject matter of ISFA - product liability
- to name a few.
Dealers cannot expect legislative
relief any time soon. Yet the product liability
issues are only going to get worse. We have an
increasingly litigious society, and the products
sold in your stores expose dealers to any number
of law suits. For example , green washing,
Chinese drywall, asbestos, faulty manufacturing,
poor quality controls, and false claims about
products you sell are common.)
For these reasons, several of the
nationwide lumber dealer associations have
banded together to form a consortium that is
called the Building Products Retailer Alliance.
(BPRA)
BPRA is the group that created
the amazing new online Cost of Doing Business
Survey and Salary Survey that was so widely used
by small dealers across the country last year.
BPRA is now introducing a new program called
“Claim Check.”
To accomplish our goals BPRA
entered into a partnership with Intertek, an
international testing laboratory with testing
labs across the globe.
Home Depot and Lowes are already
doing third party testing of the products they
sell.
Intertek, with Claim Check as the
lead, will be positioned to provide third-party
testing for every product sold in a lumberyard.
Claim Check is designed to protect dealers from
false claims and to provide further liability
protection for dealers from lawsuits. Claim
Check will verify green claims and test faulty
products like imported drywall. Claim Check
verification will be paid for by manufacturers
and therefore free to dealers. But because it
is third-party testing the Claim Check
designation will protect dealers from
unknowingly selling dangerous products.
BPRA’s Claim Check will certify
that products you sell meet established
standards.
For distributors who are already
spending lots of money on due diligence to
protect themselves from the same liability you
have, this could be a significant cost savings.
It also shifts the primary liability to Intertek,
which is indemnified for this sort of thing.
For manufacturers, we believe the value of Claim
Check is that it gives them one hoop of due
diligence to jump through, not the multiple
hoops they have to jump through to satisfy
various distributors today. It also protects
them from cheap imitations.
For dealers it means lower
liability exposure at no additional cost. It
also means you can differentiate your superior
products to those found in big boxes.
We believe that this investment
we make to protect the public will prevent the
government from doing it for us, or to us.
Claim Check will provide additional liability
protection for lumber yards and give you and
your customer’s further assurance of quality and
durability.
Single_Sheet_claimcheck_Final.pdf
FAQaboutClaimCheck_8.2010.pdf
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