Those Wacky, Tragic Warning Labels

One of the tort reform movement's most succesful media campaigns involves those "wacky warning labels" that manufacturers put on products to help avoid lawsuits. The tobacco-industry creation, M-Law, or Michigan Lawsuit Abuse Watch, now sponsors an annual contest for the craziest label, and the media eats it up (John Stossel can't get enough of these). On their face, many of the labels do seem sort of nutty, but this year's winner bothers me because I suspect that the origins of the warning label stem from a bona fide tragedy.

This year's contest winner, picked by listeners of a Detroit radio station, was a label on a laundromat washing machine that read, "Don't put any person in this washer." Maybe this sounds self-evident, but Washington area readers may recall that in 2005, a 14-year-old West Virginia boy was waiting with his 5-year-old sister for their mother to use a pay phone at a laundromat. Playing around, the boy put the little girl inside one of the washing machines, and when he closed the door, it started to run, even though he hadn't put any quarters in it. The machine air locked and there was no way to open it until after it finished the cycle. The boy and his mother tried using rocks from the parking lot to break the glass on the front, and the mother clawed through the glass with her bare hands trying to save her daughter. But by the time she was able to get her out, the little girl had died.

I remember this story being so harrowing, and the images of the mother using her fingernails to scrape at the washing machine glass while watching helplessly as her daughter was suffocated so awful, that it's hard for me to get a good laugh out of the warning label. Maybe adults know not to play around with these things, but kids will do stupid things sometimes, and anything that would give them pause, I'm all in favor of. I mean, the label may seem dumb, but what's the harm in putting it on--especially if it might save a child's life?