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Copyright 2000 St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Inc.  
St. Louis Post-Dispatch

December 16, 2000, Saturday, FIVE STAR LIFT EDITION

SECTION: EDITORIAL, Pg. 3

LENGTH: 529 words

HEADLINE: OSHA'S ERGONOMIC RULES WILL HURT MORE THAN HELP

BYLINE: Christopher S. "Kit" Bond

BODY:


In its Dec. 11 editorial, on the recently published ergonomics regulation, the Post-Dispatch apparently took a page from an OSHA press release at face value and assumed that the only way to reduce musculoskeletal disorders is to adopt a regulation that does not answer critical questions to help employers safeguard workers and that will leave small businesses exposed to litigation and citations.

In fact, the Department of Labor's own figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that injuries related to ergonomic issues declined by 26 percent from 1992 to 1998 throughout the economy, not just in the industries cited in the editorial. Unfortunately, the regulation OSHA has put out will only muddy the waters and cause employers who already have effective programs to go back and retool them just to satisfy OSHA.

The Post-Dispatch's recitation of OSHA's widely discredited cost and benefit figures also ignores the government analysis by the Small Business Administration, which determined that OSHA's initial cost estimates (the same ones quoted in the editorial) were between two and 15 times below the actual cost of the rule.

As chairman of the Senate Committee on Small Business, I have heard from thousands of small businesses about their utter fear of the excessively punitive ergonomics penalties. Let me be clear: Their fear is not that they will have to protect their employees, or even that they will have to spend some money to achieve this goal.

They are fully prepared to do what is right for their employees to avoid painful and time-losing injuries, but they believe that OSHA is using their companies to test its theories on how to prevent musculoskeletal injuries and determine what levels of exposure to risk are appropriate. While extensive research on the subject of musculoskeletal disorders has been conducted, it has not yielded the required consensus to support the thresholds OSHA imposes. Moreover, there is no agreement on remedies or interventions to safeguard workers.

A clear example of this is the controversy surrounding the use of back belts. While OSHA has endorsed the use of back belts as part of the ergonomics standard, the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health continues to maintain that back belts provide no protection against back injuries.

Consider too the fact that this rule makes an employer responsible for an injury that may not have been caused by the workplace. This means that small businesses will be held accountable for factors beyond their control. They may do everything right, or even what OSHA has required, but the problems may continue, further exposing them to liability.

The Post-Dispatch blithely dismissed these difficulties and others, merely adopting OSHA's arguments to answer relevant concerns raised by the very businesses that will have to comply with this incomprehensible rule. Unfortunately, it also concealed the fact that the inherent flaws in OSHA's ergonomics rule are the root cause of the problems small businesses will have with the rule, rather than the mean-spirited and whiny attitude the Post-Dispatch ascribed to the business community.

NOTES:
Christopher S. "Kit" Bond, a Republican, is a U.S. senator from Missouri.

LOAD-DATE: December 16, 2000




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