NAM: Manufacturing Needs Industry-Led Safety Standards
Voluntary, industry-led safety standards give manufacturers greater certainty without the growth-constraining burdens that government regulation can often impose, NAM Vice President of Domestic Policy Chris Phalen said at a recent transportation event in Washington.
What’s going on: “[M]anufacturers are always [taking] the first step of developing the standards for setting the technology, and that’s because safety itself is a powerful market incentive,” Phalen told the audience at last week’s “Beyond Regulation: The Role of Industry Standards in Safe Transportation Innovation,” a panel discussion on surface transportation reauthorization hosted by BBB National Programs and the Center for Industry Self-Regulation.
- “A safer component, material [or] technology becomes much more valuable when it can be deployed consistently across vehicles, across infrastructure, across markets and supply chains.”
- The confidence that comes from a trusted technology or system “allows manufacturers to work with a broad range of suppliers [and] companies of different sizes,” Phalen said. Being able to call on smaller, more nimble firms to ensure quick turnaround times is “very important [for] national security.”
Government’s role: While voluntary standard setting is important to manufacturing, government also has an important role to play, Phalen said.
- As an example, he pointed to federal standards for highway markers used during night driving and other low-visibility conditions.
- “You cannot have 50 different ways of doing highway markers. It’s actually proven to be extremely unsafe.”
The last word: “The takeaway is flexibility,” Phalen said. “[G]iving manufacturers the North Star of the safety standard and the flexibility and the resources to meet and exceed that, that’s where we would encourage everyone listening with power to implement it to do so.”
