Firms Balancing Costs, Savings of VDT Safety : Health: Pacific Bell, for example, will spend $8 million on lighting, furniture and other changes to reduce ailments of employees using VDTs. Treating the problems is becoming costly.
Pacific Bell figures that it will spend roughly $8 million during the next four years to bring its offices up to the standards mandated by San Francisco’s new ordinance on video display terminal safety. The high cost--and that’s in addition to routine equipment replacement--is because Pacific Bell is planning to make the improvements at all its sites throughout the state, not just those covered by the San Francisco law.
Other businesses in San Francisco are griping about what it may cost them to comply, yet Pac Bell is spending far more than the ceiling of $250 per workstation set by the ordinance.
In part that’s because repetitive stress injuries like those the ordinance is designed to help prevent already are costing Pacific Bell about $2 million a year. Making its employees’ work areas more ergonomical--that is, adapted to the worker--will reduce the number of costly injuries and claims, the company and its unions believe.
In fact, workers compensation insurers, health and safety officials and ergonomics consultants are spreading the word that making changes in employee workstations, such as those called for in the San Francisco ordinance, can actually pay off as a capital investment.
“The cost of providing safeguards is minimal compared to what it’s going to cost people in the long run,” said Dick Williams, director of the State Compensation Insurance Fund. “We’re trying to get across (to policyholders) the dollars and cents of this,” he said, adding that he believes that state and federal regulations and standards on computer safety are close at hand.
The San Francisco ordinance, which applies to businesses with 15 or more employees, sets requirements for lighting, equipment and furniture for employees who spend four or more hours a day at a computer terminal.
Advocates of such modifications point to a wide variety of studies showing impressive gains in productivity following the changes. One such study by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health recorded a 24% increase in work performance at ergonomically designed workstations over traditional ones. Other studies and the experiences of companies that have made changes show significant increases in efficiency and morale, and decreases in errors, absenteeism, turnover and stress complaints.
Pacific Bell has relatively modest expectations. James H. Stout, the company’s safety director, said Pac Bell is looking for productivity increases in the range of 3% to 5%, “and if we add 2% productivity, it would wash the cost of what we’re doing over a three- to five-year period.” Additionally, he said, if workers compensation claims decrease, as the company expects, benefit costs will decline. Overall, he said, it makes “paying for (these) onetime improvements . . . good business.”
Yet Pacific Bell and many other companies whose employees work long hours at VDTs are reluctant to address the issue of job design--an issue many experts say is just as important as ergonomically designed workstations. Management and labor are only beginning to debate whether jobs could or should be restructured to give employees specific breaks from their computer keyboards or even to alternate computer work with other tasks. Most companies say such suggestions involve tremendous costs.
Increased productivity and decreased turnover rates clearly are positives on a company’s bottom line. But they are more subjective and often harder to calculate than outlays for new equipment, chairs or VDT accessories.
The cost of workers compensation insurance, however, is not.
Many of the state’s top providers of workers compensation insurance are becoming increasingly concerned about such repetitive stress injuries in offices. The number of such claims has risen substantially the past five years. The Department of Labor, which lumps all repetitive-motion injuries together, said that in 1989 repeated trauma disorders accounted for more than 52% of all reported occupational illnesses, up from 18% only eight years earlier.
That includes such occupations as meatpacker and assembly line worker, where repetitive-motion injuries are common. Exact figures for VDT-related injuries are not available because, so far, there is no separate category for them.
Yet insurers are worried that this could be an explosive issue in the near future, as the cumulative effects of the widespread use of VDTs begin to be known. So they are giving their policyholders a kind of “pay now or pay later” warning, reminding them that eventually they pay back, through increased premiums, the cost of treating on-the-job injuries.
Workers compensation insurance is simply a way of spreading the cost of claims--with an added financing or handling charge--over a few years; the larger the company, the greater percentage of the total cost of claims that company will have to repay.
Just one claim could cause a company’s premiums to skyrocket--a fact that could provide incentive to small businesses in San Francisco who fear that spending money on their workstations will put them at a disadvantage to competitors in other cities that have no such regulations.
The best that workers compensation can do for a small company facing one substantial claim is “take care of that large shock loss and spread it out over the next three to five years,” said A. Michael Ratcliffe, technical director and workers compensation specialist at Liberty Mutual’s Pleasanton, Calif., office. “But eventually, they would be paying it back.”
Compared to the costs of treating even one serious case of repetitive stress or cumulative trauma, even state-of-the-art modifications to computer workstations are “really inexpensive,” Ratcliffe said.
And earlier, rather than later, intervention is more cost-effective, most experts agree, because such injuries can worsen--and become more expensive to treat--the longer they are allowed to develop.
There are no uniform estimates of “average” cost of treating such injuries, in part because they are so individual in nature. And insurers and safety organizations are just now beginning to grapple with the need to devise ways of tracking as a distinct syndrome all the divergent symptoms and injuries related to repetitive stress.
However, actual figures from workers compensation claims throughout the state show that such injuries can cost from a few hundred dollars to treat (if caught in the early stages) to as much as $50,000 for a severe case of tenosynovitis, a form of repetitive stress injury affecting tendons and the sympathetic nervous system. Treatment of carpal tunnel injuries, another class of repetitive stress injury that may require surgery, also can be costly, with claims ranging up to $20,000.
On the other hand, ergonomic “fixes” range in cost from next to nothing to as much as a couple of thousand dollars per workstation, depending on the conditions, the employee’s needs and the type of equipment purchased.
The San Francisco ordinance says employers aren’t required to spend more than $250 per workstation on modifications during the first two years the ordinance is in effect. After that, businesses are given another two years to meet the standards, regardless of costs.
Much can be done within that initial price range, said Marilyn Joyce, president of the Joyce Institute, an ergonomics training and consulting firm based in Seattle. Joyce said consultants “look first at what can be done by adjusting existing workplaces. Many of these things are no-cost, and a number of them are low-cost items.”
These include making better use of adjustable features already at the workstation, rearranging lights or turning VDT monitors to eliminate glare and purchasing some inexpensive pieces of equipment, such as wrist rests for keyboards and adjustable platforms for monitors (neither of which should cost more than $100).
Other furniture and equipment changes can be more costly. Infinitely adjustable chairs, for example, can cost as much as $800 or $1,000 apiece, but there are chairs that meet adjustability standards and cost half that much.
Besides ergonomics consultants and company safety directors, insurance firms are also carefully watching trends in claims, and many are even making their own studies of computer-related ergonomics. Workers compensation insurers also make recommendations to their policyholders about how to reduce potential risks for repetitive stress injuries.
“We’re finding (that) our clients see it’s a cost, but if they can prevent one carpal tunnel or repetitive trauma claim from occurring, it’s worth the cost,” said Charles Mitchell of C. E. Heath, a workers compensation specialty carrier.
At the Los Angeles Times, journalists began experiencing repetitive stress problems in the mid-1980s. Workers compensation claims related to repetitive stress injuries among the approximately 1,100 full-time editorial department employees at its California sites have amounted to $1.36 million over seven years, according to Edith Haddad, California manager of workers compensation for Times Mirror Co., the newspaper’s parent company.
By the end of 1990, the number of claims exceeded 300, twice as many as for all other injury claims filed by editorial department employees during that period. However, the number of new claims began declining after The Times implemented extensive modifications to its workstations. The Times has spent an estimated $1 million for such improvements in its editorial department alone, often spending several thousands of dollars at each workstation.
Since it began its major refurbishing of workstations, new claims related to repetitive stress injuries filed by editorial department employees at the newspaper’s main office in Los Angeles have dropped 24%, Haddad said.
Yet despite all the numbers being generated by these injuries, the great intangible is the human factor. Joseph Kinney, founder and director of the nonprofit National Safe Workplace Institute in Chicago, said: “This thing is mammoth. We get more calls, more complaints, more people desperately seeking help on (repetitive stress injuries) than on anything else. . . . I don’t hear any kind of anxiety levels and frustration higher than (they are) on this issue.”
Kinney noted that the injuries are “a career-ender for many people. And these are amazingly productive and important people in our society, people who work as reservationists, phone operators, people in typing pools, journalists, meat cutters. These are people who help keep this country going.”
Even though computer technology has made a profound impact on the way nearly 50 million office workers do their jobs, the link between insurance companies’ loss control divisions and their policyholders is one of the few business-to-business relationships addressing the impact.
In recent years, makers of office furnishings have stepped up efforts to offer ergonomically sound, highly adjustable products. Now, instead of just ordering from a fixed catalogue of products, big companies facing major refurbishing tasks often can command specially designed equipment or workstations from the manufacturers.
Among those furniture makers, Steelcase Inc. of Grand Rapids, Mich., and competitor Haworth Inc. in nearby Holland, Mich., have undertaken large custom orders from clients faced with increasing repetitive stress injury claims. Haworth worked with Ohio Bell, another regional phone company, to redesign its operators’ workstations. Steelcase modified its adjustable computer table to the specifications of the Los Angeles Times.
Many makers of the computer equipment have their own in-house ergonomics or “human factors” departments that participate in the design of products, but customization of products and even formal, regular exchange of workplace safety needs are rare. And, in fact, some big computer makers have been vocal opponents of proposed VDT-safety regulations that would affect their work sites.
In the United States, so far, most standards offer only guidelines for physical features, such as the brightness of the characters on the screen, the thickness of the keyboard and the depth of the chair seat. A more important issue, many health and safety experts agree, concerns the actual structure of the jobs being done on computers and video display terminals.
Many ergonomists already are recommending that office workers’ jobs be redesigned to alternate between work at VDTs and other related tasks, to include regular, short breaks and to reduce other stresses, such as electronic monitoring of production.
But many companies are loath to tackle such issues, fearing the costs and ramifications for the entire structure of the business.
Among them are Pacific Bell and most of the other telephone companies across the United States, whose information operators are being given ergonomically designed workstations but still must perform an incredible number of repetitive motions on the keyboard every hour.
This is a crucial issue and just as important as providing ergonomically sound equipment, said Louis Slesin, editor and publisher of VDT News, a New York-based publication devoted to VDT issues.
“If you look at all studies, after four or five hours at a VDT,” he said, “people hit a brick wall, and the incidents of repetitive stress injuries . . . are much more pronounced, and complaints shoot up.
“The long-term solution--and I’m not too sanguine about business taking it up--is making the work load different. The 15-minute break (every four hours) is one way around that,” he said, “but it’s only a stopgap measure. The real thing I’d like to see instituted is more diversified work patterns so employees do different things throughout the day. Job design is a complex management issue, but in the long term it is the real solution to this problem.”
THE BOTTOM LINE OF ERGONOMICS
Average costs of ergonomic furnishings*: Adjustable chair: $500-$800 Adjustable VDT stand: $1,200 Wrist rests: $50 Adjustable arm for monitor: $100 Anti-glare screen: $75 Anti-glare hood: $25 Footrests: $35 Inflatable back pillow: $25 Fabric chair-back cushion: $100 Adjustable keyboard shelf: $150 Work/rest-monitoring software: $50
* not all workstations require all items
Potential savings:
* Worker compensation claims for repetitive stress injuries can cost up to $50,000; companies will repay most, if not all, of the cost of claims within a 3-5 year period. OSHA estimates that by the year 2000, cumulative trauma disorders will account for 50 cents of each dollar employers spend on medical care.
* One study reported turnover dropped to 5% a year from 35% a year after ergonomically designed workstations were installed. Morale increases, absenteeism declines. The Labor Department said 3.2 million cases of repetitive motion injuries in 1989 were serious enough to cost lost time from jobs, adding up to 57 million lost workdays.
* Haworth Inc., an office furniture manufacturer, studied efficiency rates of workers using ergonomically designed keyboards; keystroke rates increased 25% and typing errors dropped 50%.
* Various results are reported from studies of productivity; in one study, short, regular rest breaks alone added a 7% to 10% improvement; a NIOSH study showed a 24% increase in work performance at ergonomically designed workstations over traditional ones.
* A company that experiences a substantial number of similar claims without taking remedial action could face significant OSHA fines and/or loss of workers’ compensation insurance coverage.
