Copyright 2000 The Houston Chronicle Publishing Company
The Houston Chronicle
August 27, 2000, Sunday 2 STAR EDITION
SECTION: BUSINESS; Pg. 1
LENGTH: 1912 words
HEADLINE:
Fight still rages over ergonomics;
Government seeks repetitive-stress
regulation by year-end as business tries to derail it
SOURCE: Staff
BYLINE: L.M.
SIXEL
BODY:
In 1990, then-Secretary of Labor
Elizabeth Dole declared that musculo-skeletal injuries such as carpal tunnel
syndrome were a critical workplace problem that caused 48 percent of on-the-job
injuries.
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration, then under
the administration of President Bush, vowed to put a regulation in place to end
the damage that repetitive stress can do to the hands and backs of workers.
Ten years later, there is still no ergonomics standard - and if small
businesses, trade associations and congressional Republicans have their way,
there won't ever be any.
After issuing a preliminary standard last year,
OSHA is rushing to get a final regulation out by the end of the year. It would
require employers in many industries to re-engineer jobs when one employee
complains of a musculo-skeletal disorder.
Both the House and Senate,
however, recently passed amendments to their labor appropriation bills that
would prevent OSHA from implementing or enforcing an ergonomics
regulation next year.
The bills, now in conference committee,
are expected to sail though both chambers. President Clinton has threatened to
veto spending bills that prohibit OSHA from enforcing an ergonomic standard,
however.
Small businesses in particular are upset at provisions in the
proposed regulation. They're worried they'll end up financially responsible for
injuries suffered while an employee is off golfing or water-skiing.
Another worry is that ergonomic problems affect soft tissues such as
back muscles that X-rays or other tests are unable to verify. It's not like lead
exposure, which can be measured by a blood test.
"It's like the
difference between a speed limit of 25 miles per hour vs. 'don't go too fast,' "
said a congressional staff member opposed to the regulation. "My vision of fast
is different than yours."
Small businesses have been successful at
getting the issue in front of Congress.
"We've done a good job over the
last couple of months of stalling these ergonomic rules," boasted Robert Howden,
executive director of the National Federation of Independent Business in Texas.
"We don't want to be told by the federal government what to do."
But to
safety and health advocates, the ergonomics rule is long overdue.
"If
OSHA does its job as the regulator of safety and health in the workplace, this
is the big one," said Peg Seminario, director of safety and health for the
AFL-CIO in Washington, D.C.
Today, musculo-skeletal disorders represent
a third of all lost-time workplace injuries. To put it in perspective, 6,000
people get killed each year on the job; 600,000 people miss work because of
musculo-skeletal injuries.
The new ergonomics rule can't come soon
enough for workers who spend their days cutting up chickens, said Emilio "Red"
Gomez, president of the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 408 in Houston.
Employees are supposed to be rotated from job to job to prevent
repetitive-stress problems, but when a supervisor finds an employee who is
really good at, say, boning chicken breasts, he doesn't want to transfer him to
another job, Gomez said.
Gomez, who represents poultry workers at
several plants in East Texas, said he fights a continual battle with employers
over ergonomics. Some employees are in such pain from spending their days
pulling out livers and gizzards that they can't sleep at night, but Gomez said
it's hard to get supervisors to take the problem seriously.
When an
employee injures, say, his right hand, instead of giving him time off to
recover, the company puts him on a production line that requires the use of his
left hand, Gomez said.
"All they're worried about is their quotas and
not their people," asserted Gomez, who said the proposed ergonomic standard is
the best thing that could happen to workers.
Candy Williams knows what
ergonomic-related pain is like. The 44-year-old has spent eight years at the
Tyson Foods plant in Center keeping conveyor belts clear, moving trays of
chicken and sweeping up.
She has had trouble with hand pain since 1995.
She started having shoulder troubles after trays fell on her in 1997. Since
then, rotating her arms has aggravated her shoulders.
She had surgery on
her left shoulder recently to relieve the pain and just obtained approval for
arthroscopic surgery on her right shoulder.
Williams, who has been on
the plant's safety committee for four years, is glad Tyson has a mandatory
production-line rotation policy.
"It made a positive effect," she said,
referring to the two-hour job limit rule. "It's a lot easier if you're not doing
the same thing every day all day."
Tyson also is redesigning work
stations to make the work easier and is rotating people from standing jobs to
sitting jobs. And it has tried different kinds of knives and saws, said
Williams, who lives in Mansfield, La.
Tyson spokesman Ed Nicholson said
the Springdale, Ark.-based firm has an aggressive early-intervention program
that began in 1987. If problems are dealt with early, they tend not to become
severe, he said.
That policy appears to make injury rates higher than
they actually are, Nicholson said.
If an employee complains about a sore
hand, for example, the company will switch him to another job to give the hand a
rest. While the injury must be reported to OSHA, in the long run it has reduced
the number of severe injuries and workers compensation claims.
Until
now, OSHA has used the "general duty" clause - a catchall regulation that
requires employers to maintain a safe work environment for its employees - to
fine employers who don't pay enough attention to repetitive-stress injuries.
But employers have been able to get around that regulation pretty
easily, said Tom Wilson, an employment lawyer with Vinson & Elkins in
Houston.
Battle goes back years
This is not the first time
Congress has tried to stop an ergonomic regulation, said
Seminario, the AFL-CIO director of safety and health. It succeeded in preventing
OSHA from issuing one in both the 1996 and 1998 budget years.
To try to
derail the regulation this time, several committees in Congress are
investigating OSHA's hiring of experts to testify on behalf of the regulation,
Seminario said.
According to the agency's critics, OSHA paid the
witnesses to prepare testimony in support of an ergonomics
regulation. The congressional committees are asking OSHA for a copy of
every contract it has signed relating to the ergonomics issue. The goal is to
delay OSHA so it can't get the regulation out by the end of the year, Seminario
said.
"OSHA isn't neutral," said Charles Jeffress, assistant secretary
of labor over OSHA, clearly frustrated about the debate over the experts he
hired. This is not a time when you're seeking objectivity, he said. "It's the
agency saying: 'This is a problem, and this solution makes sense.' "
Jeffress, who wants to leave ergonomics as his legacy, added: "How can
we propose a rule if we don't have a point of view?"
Jeffress speculated
that employers are more fearful of uncertainty than anything else when it comes
to the ergonomics issue.
"We've been living with strains and sprains,
and our bodies are wearing out," he said. "It's been accepted so long that it's
the natural course of things."
Despite the debate, he said, many
companies spend a lot of money on ergonomics each year because it reduces
workers compensation claims and lost work days and boosts productivity. Xerox,
for example, spends $ 3 million, he said.
What rankles Seminario about
the opposition to the ergonomics regulation is that employers
don't have to make any workplace changes until an employee is injured.
The rule really ought to be preventive, she said. Why should someone
have to get hurt before employers ensure that others don't fall victim to the
same injury?
Seminario also would like to see the proposed regulation
focus more on exposure to injury rather than the injuries themselves. OSHA's
draft proposal in 1995 focused on exposure - such as the number of times per
month and the length of time per day someone did a repetitive task.
Industry didn't like that proposal, she said, insisting that coverage be
triggered by injuries. So this time around, OSHA combined the two ideas by
triggering coverage with an injury but then requiring an employer to examine
exposure to all employees.
That's doesn't sit well with the Baylor
College of Medicine in Houston. It is concerned that a single employee could
force the hospital to re-engineer an entire job classification, according to
comments it submitted to OSHA.
Baylor urged OSHA to require intervention
if two employees or 10 percent of workers - whichever was greater - in the same
job category complained of ergonomics-related injuries.
In the proposed
regulation, one of the toughest provisions for small businesses to swallow deals
with paid worker time off for injuries. It says employees with an
ergonomics-related injury can get up to six months of leave - and be paid 90
percent of their after-tax earnings while they're recuperating.
Joe Ols,
president of Ols Maintenance Supply in Houston, said that the proposal would put
companies like his out of business. It would be impossible to pay someone for
six months without getting any production out of him, said Ols, who has 15
employees.
Baylor also is concerned about the six-month provision.
Either drop it, Baylor asked OSHA, or at least reduce it to six weeks. In making
its argument, Baylor cited studies showing that workers who receive most of
their pre-injury salary tend to take longer to recover.
Not true, said
Seminario. OSHA has been mandating since 1978 that employees exposed to lead get
time off. The time-off provision has been extended to other work-related
injuries and illnesses, and the pay provision hasn't caused workers to draw out
their recuperation time, Seminario said.
Besides, she said, it's not the
employee who decides to stay home. The health-care provider that the employer
has chosen is the one who makes the decision.
The reason it's important
that an employee be paid about the same when recuperating as on the job, she
said, is that employees shouldn't be penalized for coming forward to report an
injury.
The provision also is in an employer's interest, she said.
Treatment of severe ergonomics-related injuries tend to be expensive, she said,
so it's best for an employer to catch them early.
But Tom Anderson,
director of human resources for Fort Bend County and chairman of the Workplace,
Health and Safety Committee for the Society for Human Resource Management,
worries that the OSHA proposal will nationalize workplace injury decisions that
the states have traditionally had the power to decide.
Traditionally, it
has been up to the states to decide the level of income compensation and the
length of time an employee should get off to recuperate from an injury.
States want to control those costs to keep workers' compensation rates
low, he said. Workers' comp is an important factor when companies are thinking
of doing business in a state.
Baylor also asked OSHA to remove lower
back pain from the proposed rule.
A lot of time, medical diagnoses are a
description of a person's complaint, said Jim Kelaher, director of occupational
health at Baylor. If a person says, "My back hurts," the diagnosis is lower back
pain.
"You can't do an X-ray to find pain or take a blood test to tell
if a muscle hurts," Kelaher said.
GRAPHIC: Photos: 1.
Candy Williams wears braces on both hands to elieve the pain of carpal tunnel
syndrome. Williams, who worked at Tyson Foods in Center for eight years,
developed shoulder troubles in 1997 and is awaiting her second shoulder surgery
(color); 2. Warehouse workers Juan Zamudio, left, and Mario Garcia load a truck
with an outgoing order at the Ols Maintenance Supply Co. (color); 3. Joe Ols of
Ols Maintenance Supply checks out an order in the warehouse. Ols, who has 15
employees, says proposed ergonomics regulations could put a
small company such as his out of business (b/w, p. 4); 1. Charlie Gesell /
Special to the Chronicle, 2-3. E. Joseph Deering / Chronicle
LOAD-DATE: November 21, 2000 
