10-Year Fight Yields New Ergonomics Standard That Will Prevent Millions of Worker Injuries

Millions of workers will be spared painful repetitive stress injuries under OSHA's new ergonomics standard for American workplaces. Issued Nov. 13 after a decade of efforts by the business community and anti-worker members of Congress to derail the rule, the standard "is the most important worker safety action developed" in OSHA's history, AFL-CIO President John Sweeney said.

OSHA estimates that 1.8 million workers a year report such work-related musculoskeletal disorders as carpal tunnel syndrome, tendinitis and back injuries—and more than 600,000 of those workers are forced to take time off from work to recover. The safety agency predicts that the new standard will prevent 4.6 million such injuries in the first 10 years.

"Workers in poultry plants, meat packing and auto assembly, along with computer operators, nurses' aides, cashiers and others in high-risk jobs, will finally have much-needed protection," Sweeney said.

"Since the passage of OSHA in 1970, the job fatality rate has been cut by 75 percent—saving more than 220,000 lives," said AFL-CIO Safety and Health Director Peg Seminario. "Job injury rates have been lowered by 39 percent. This new standard will also help make jobs safer and lower injury rates even more."

Seminario discussed the standard during a press roundtable Nov. 13 that included testimony from a chemical plant employee fired from her job after she suffered severe nerve damage from repeated lifting, reaching and twisting and a trade expert and writer at an Internet publishing company disabled from intensive computer work.

Business groups have argued that no scientific evidence backs up the need for the new ergonomics standard—despite years of research and studies to the contrary, including reports from the National Academy of Sciences, National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health and the dozens of hearings with hundreds of witnesses that OSHA conducted around the country this year.

"There's a tremendous amount of science...and it's very clear that some simple intervention would certainly help with prevention of musculoskeletal injuries," said Dr. Laura Welch, director of Occupational and Environmental Medicine at Washington Hospital Center in Washington, D.C.

But the battle over the ergonomics standard is not over, as business groups and their allies in Congress are expected to continue their efforts to kill the worker safety rules. Opponents of the new safety standard are expected to continue their fight to include a ban in the still-pending fiscal year 2001 appropriations legislation that funds OSHA that would prevent the agency from spending any money on implementing the standard. They also may take their fight to the courts.

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