Yesterday, Johnson & Johnson (J&J) added five more products to its January 2010 recall. It’s not so much that J&J added five products to the January recall (which was recall #5), as J&J is really announcing a 6th recall. Compared to the massive McNeil Consumer Healthcare recalls of the last two years, yesterday’s J&J recall was relatively small.
What’s striking is the reason – the products, including Benadryl and Extra Strength Tylenol – were supposed to be recalled back in January as well, but the company screwed up. Or, in the words of J&J, the products were “inadvertently omitted from the initial recall.” By recall, J&J meant recall #4 (January 2010) and recall #5 (April 2010), not the original recall back at the end of 2008 – when this whole mess began. The reason for the recall is that the batches were contaminated with 2,4,6-tribromoanisole – an industrial chemical used to treat wood products (like shipping pallets).
Perhaps, most interesting, today’s products were not made at the Fort Washington plant, where the other products were manufactured. Instead, they were made at the company’s Puerto Rico facility. This is really quite troubling because it shows systematic failures in J&J’s manufacturing across the entire company. Given that the manufacturing woes are not confined to a single J&J plant, there’s no reason to believe that the problems are confined only to McNeil Consumer Healthcare products.
Meanwhile, on Tuesday, I met with a handful of acquaintances from J&J to hear their tales of woe from inside the company. I had lunch in New Brunswick and then traveled down to Plymouth Meeting, near the Fort Washington facility. As you might imagine, employees are devastated at what has happened to their company. A few of them feel like the company is being viciously attacked and unfairly portrayed in the media. However, most feel that William Weldon has led the company from the most respected into the industry to one that is almost completely distrusted. I feel bad for those decent and honest J&J employees. How sad is it to put your trust into something and build a career someplace, only to have it destroyed through executive greed?
Evidently the City of New Brunswick and the folks at New Jersey Transit are also concerned about employee morale at J&J – NJ Transit has put up suicide prevention posters in the New Brunswick train station across from J&J (pictured below).
What’s striking is the reason – the products, including Benadryl and Extra Strength Tylenol – were supposed to be recalled back in January as well, but the company screwed up. Or, in the words of J&J, the products were “inadvertently omitted from the initial recall.” By recall, J&J meant recall #4 (January 2010) and recall #5 (April 2010), not the original recall back at the end of 2008 – when this whole mess began. The reason for the recall is that the batches were contaminated with 2,4,6-tribromoanisole – an industrial chemical used to treat wood products (like shipping pallets).
Perhaps, most interesting, today’s products were not made at the Fort Washington plant, where the other products were manufactured. Instead, they were made at the company’s Puerto Rico facility. This is really quite troubling because it shows systematic failures in J&J’s manufacturing across the entire company. Given that the manufacturing woes are not confined to a single J&J plant, there’s no reason to believe that the problems are confined only to McNeil Consumer Healthcare products.
Meanwhile, on Tuesday, I met with a handful of acquaintances from J&J to hear their tales of woe from inside the company. I had lunch in New Brunswick and then traveled down to Plymouth Meeting, near the Fort Washington facility. As you might imagine, employees are devastated at what has happened to their company. A few of them feel like the company is being viciously attacked and unfairly portrayed in the media. However, most feel that William Weldon has led the company from the most respected into the industry to one that is almost completely distrusted. I feel bad for those decent and honest J&J employees. How sad is it to put your trust into something and build a career someplace, only to have it destroyed through executive greed?
Evidently the City of New Brunswick and the folks at New Jersey Transit are also concerned about employee morale at J&J – NJ Transit has put up suicide prevention posters in the New Brunswick train station across from J&J (pictured below).
