WASHINGTON, D.C. — Cash settlements in the wood bedroom furniture antidumping cash are beginning to receive national attention.
On Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal published an article dealing with the settlements, the first by a national consumer newspaper. It discusses a process in which domestic producers and their legal counsel generate cash payments from Chinese wood bedroom producers in exchange for letting those factories be removed from an annual administrative review that determines if they warrant a higher duty rate on bedrooms they ship to the U.S. market.

The duties are intended to level the playing field for bedrooms the U.S. government and U.S. furniture producers claim is illegally priced based on materials and other related production and shipping costs. The cash settlements, which represent a percentage of a factory's annual shipments, are paid to the producers and their legal counsel.

Furniture/Today first reported on the settlements in May 2007 and has continued to report on the issue up through the International Trade Commission hearings last October. Those hearings were the first time that domestic producers discussed the matter in public. At that point they claimed the settlements were a way to mitigate legal costs associated with the antidumping case.