Monitoring of VDT Work Leads to More Injuries, Study Says
Electronically monitoring the output of workers at video display terminals significantly increases VDT-related health problems such as aching wrists, back and neck woes and fatigue, according to a study released Friday by the Communications Workers of America and a university industrial engineering expert.
The study--lacking medical precision because it was based solely on the survey responses of a limited number of employees--is the first to confirm years of anecdotal grumbling about the physical consequences of working at a computer in a monitored office.
In these workplaces, the computer that allows VDTs to exchange data simultaneously keeps track of an employee’s keystrokes per minute, the number of minutes the worker is away from his or her desk and, in service-related industries, the number of calls he or she handles in a day. Some workers complain that outside of scheduled breaks and lunch, they are not permitted to stop working for more than a few minutes a day. In addition, conversations of workers such as airline reservation clerks and telephone operators are often monitored by supervisors.
Unions--particularly the CWA, which represents 450,000 telecommunications workers who use VDTs--have long insisted that computer monitoring violates employee privacy rights.
Less clear was whether monitored employees--under pressure to work faster because of the threat of being disciplined for failing to meet an employer’s computer-generated standards--were more susceptible to VDT-related injuries.
The CWA study, performed by Michael Smith, chairman of the department of industrial engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and former chief of the stress research section of the government’s National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, said monitored workers ache more than employees who perform the same type of job but whose output is not constantly tabulated by computer.
Smith and the union sent questionnaires to 2,900 randomly selected VDT workers at the seven big regional phone companies. Some 762 workers responded.
Smith said monitored workers were 59% more likely than unmonitored workers to complain of a loss of feeling in their fingers and wrists, 112% more likely to complain of stiff or sore wrists, 56% more likely to complain of neck and shoulder pain, 25% more likely to complain of severe fatigue and 30% more likely to complain of extreme anxiety.
Spokesmen for several of the phone companies said they could not comment because they had yet to see the report.
Kathleen Flynn, a Pacific Bell spokeswoman, said that while operators’ conversations are “occasionally monitored for quality control . . . we don’t have any job categories where we monitor keystrokes.”
O. Bruce Dickerson, executive director of the New York-based Center for Office Technology, an industry clearinghouse, said: “I think it is much too soon to tie (monitoring) to the VDT (injuries). There are a lot of potential stress inducers in the workplace.”
Louis Slesin, publisher of VDT News, a journal that monitors VDT-related health issues, said the report “fits into the picture that’s emerging that there are many contributing factors to repetitive stress illness, not just the equipment itself. This is a different part of the puzzle. You’re monitored, you’re under greater tension.”
Some 40 million Americans now work on VDTs. A 1987 report by the U.S. Office of Technology Assessment, the most recent report on monitoring, estimated that 4 million to 6 million clerical employees--some who use VDTs, some who don’t--were monitored, most without their knowledge.
