Consumer Bill of Rights
On 15 March 1962 former US President John F. Kennedy said:
Consumers by definition include us all. They are the largest economic group, affecting and affected by almost every public and private economic decision. Yet they are the only important group… whose views are often not heard.There are eight basic consumer rights which include the rights to:
- satisfaction of basic needs – to have access to basic, essential goods and services: adequate food, clothing, shelter, health care, education, public utilities, water and sanitation
- safety – to be protected against products, production processes and services which are hazardous to health or life
- information – to be given the facts needed to make an informed choice, and to be protected against dishonest or misleading advertising and labelling.
- choice – to be able to select from a range of products and services, offered at competitive prices with an assurance of satisfactory quality
- be heard – to have consumer interests represented in the making and execution of government policy, and in the development of products and services.
- redress – to receive a fair settlement of just claims, including compensation for misrepresentation, shoddy goods or unsatisfactory services.
- consumer education – to acquire knowledge and skills needed to make informed, confident choices about goods and services, while being aware of basic consumer rights and responsibilities and how to act on them.
- a healthy environment -to live and work in an environment that is non-threatening to the well being of present and future generations.
Read more about this topic: Consumers International
Famous quotes containing the words bill of rights, consumer, bill and/or rights:
“We have our difficulties, true; but we are a wiser and a tougher nation than we were in 1932. Never have there been six years of such far flung internal preparedness in all of history. And this has been done without any dictator’s power to command, without conscription of labor or confiscation of capital, without concentration camps and without a scratch on freedom of speech, freedom of the press or the rest of the Bill of Rights.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)
“The poverty of our century is unlike that of any other. It is not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich. Consequently, the modern poor are not pitied ... but written off as trash. The twentieth-century consumer economy has produced the first culture for which a beggar is a reminder of nothing.”
—John Berger (b. 1926)
“It is my belief that there are “absolutes” in our Bill of Rights, and that they were put there on purpose by men who knew what words meant, and meant their prohibitions to be “absolute.””
—Hugo Black (b. 1922)
“Human beings have rights, because they are moral beings: the rights of all men grow out of their moral nature; and as all men have the same moral nature, they have essentially the same rights. These rights may be wrested from the slave, but they cannot be alienated: his title to himself is as perfect now, as is that of Lyman Beecher: it is stamped on his moral being, and is, like it, imperishable.”
—Angelina Grimké (1805–1879)