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It's a history of consumer will power, of wins and losses, but ultimately, of hope. What I learned is that consumer protection is a lot like the tide. It ebbs and flows. It's often a two steps forward, one step back process.
Below is an interview with Felix about his approach to creating OCJ's Consumer Protection Timeline and what this research tells us about the future of consumer protections. The transcription has been edited for length.
Q: How did you go about approaching this massive research project? Where did you start?
A: I knew that the best place to start this project was to look at our allies and the other consumer organizations that work in this space. My first stop was the National Consumer Law Center’s (NCLC) website, which has a really nice timeline of its own. And then I popped through a few other states that had done similar research to decide how to structure ours.
I also talked with experts in the field, including long-time consumer rights practitioner [and OCJ Board Member, Richard] "Dick” Slottee, who told me that consumer protection occurs in eras. Dick explained the field has these transitional shifts often defined by political pressures and the attitudes of the Court. Dividing the timeline up into eras would help demonstrate the political influences that ultimately led to the passing and repealing of many consumer protection laws.
Q: Were there any key moments that came up in your research that particularly surprised you?
A: In 1878, the Family Protection Statute emerged as the first consumer protection in Oregon, and it predated all federal consumer protection laws. The Pure Food and Drug Act, which many consider the first federal consumer protection law, was passed 28 years later in 1906. The fact that we had consumer protection on the books in Oregon this early and before the federal government is super cool.
Another highlight for me was discovering the Consumer Bill of Rights. This Bill of Rights is a declaration of basic consumer rights created in 1962 during the Kennedy Administration. This work was so revolutionary and ahead of its time that the United Nations (UN) used it as the basis for its own UN Guidelines for Consumer Protection. It's not often anyone beats the UN to something!
Q: What did you learn from looking at the topic of consumer protection over such a long period of time?
A: Review at such a scope is really a privilege. To have the time to sit and look at the evolution of something like consumer protection on the order of hundreds of years, you see a lot of patterns that would be easy to miss otherwise.
Q: Can you describe the evolving importance of consumer protection through the eras?
A: Businesses grow over time. Very few businesses just pop out of nowhere and become major power holders; power comes with the accumulation of wealth and assets. That accumulation of power is what positions consumers to have to fight.
In the beginning, the US market was ruled by the concept of “buyer beware,” the idea that it was the buyer's responsibility to ensure what was said about a product was true. This transitioned to “seller take care” as businesses gained more power, scale, and leverage to deceive consumers.
Q: How does this timeline help us make sense of our current era of consumer rights?
A: I think it's really important to talk about the historical grounds for this process because it makes the moment we’re currently in less scary. Across all of history, the consumer always wins in the end. That’s the lesson. Any rights once realized and then repealed will be realized again. That’s what we’ve continued to see in this history.
When we lose major protections, we learn what they were doing for consumers in the first place. It's really easy to look at laws and have no idea how many people are being protected because we aren't affected by them.
Q: What happens next?
A: When the tide draws back, you can see what you're missing, and I think that’s what’s going to happen over the next four years in the consumer protection space. I’m scared to lose a lot of important protections, but hopefully, we can show everyday people and legislators how crucial these guardrails are.
We have a saying that consumer protection laws are written in blood because the original laws were. Slaughterhouse regulations, food and drug regulations—these laws were written because of the harm done to the people who brought these cases to the table.
I’ll never accuse anyone of taking protections for granted, because you can’t take for granted what you don’t know. There might be short-term monetary gains that look impressive on paper, but I think we’ll find that the protections lost are going to cost us a lot more.
If I were to shake my magic eight ball, I would say many lessons will be learned from this period, and after the next four or five years, we'll see an even stronger recommitment to consumer protection ideals.
