Computer Worker Turns Injury Into Advocacy

Her name was Nancy. She was calling from Florida. She said she had been an airline reservation clerk before the stress of her job--rigid posture at the computer keyboard and heavy productivity demands--resulted in a neuromuscular illness. Unable to continue that job, she was a $5-an-hour travel agent.

“This whole experience has been like being hit in the stomach by 10,000 tons,” she said, occasionally sobbing. “It’s ruined my life. It’s like being a rape victim. People don’t understand what happens to you.”

Samantha Greenberg, the woman on the other end of the telephone line, did.

For the last year and a half, Greenberg, 46, a disabled ex-computer worker, has run what she calls the Computer Injury Network out of her Brentwood condominium.

In an era in which repetitive-strain illness is widely recognized as the occupational disease of the ‘90s, Greenberg is regarded as the nation’s only citizen activist devoting herself full time to the cause of ailing computer workers. She is a beacon to callers with aching arms and wrists who are desperate to persuade skeptical bosses that the pace of work on their video display terminals endangers their health.

“In the VDT world she’s quite unique,” said Louis Slesin, editor of New York-based VDT News, a journal that monitors research about the medical effects of computer work.

Greenberg is a one-woman clearinghouse who haunts scores of publications from newspapers to medical journals. She holds support group meetings in her home. She serves on committees urging government legislation to make employers give regular breaks to VDT workers, a notion successfully opposed by business lobbyists.

She does all this with the cold fury of a victim who prefers to call herself a survivor. Her right arm is so weakened from her last job at a computer that she shakes hands left-handed. She has her hair done short because it hurts to hold a blow-dryer.

It would not have happened, she said, if she lived in a country that--like much of Europe--had government standards regulating the workplace use of VDTs.

“I call us the walking wounded,” she said the other day to 100 law librarians who had invited her to speak at a conference on computer technology. “The consensus of injured workers I talk to is that machines are treated better than we are.”

Greenberg said she had pounded typewriters and computer keyboards as a bookkeeper and accountant for a quarter-century, but something went wrong with a job she took in 1988 for a dermatologist.

She said she was working at least eight hours a day punching entries into a VDT without breaks. Physicians routinely say that such breaks are crucial to avoiding hand or arm injuries.

The idea never occurred to Greenberg. “My manager was uninformed. I was uninformed. I didn’t know what to look for. I didn’t know I was injured from a computer.”

Within months, she developed an elbow inflammation popularly known as tennis elbow; she did not play tennis.

She said she began wearing wrist splints to work and taking cortisone shots and pills. When none of it worked she quit her job.

“I’d tell my friends I thought I’d gotten injured at the computer and they looked at me like I was crazy,” she said.

She underwent surgery to relieve pressure on muscles in the elbow, stayed at home watching talk shows and gained 20 pounds. She loved to read but could hold nothing heavier than a paperback. Although she had a new husband and a new home, she was miserable.

Out of desperation she began visiting libraries, trying to learn more about the connection between computer work and illness.

Although the federal government’s National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health had been researching the problem for years, relatively little had appeared in popular journals at the time Greenberg was injured. Meanwhile, complaints of repetitive strain illness, which afflicts workers ranging from supermarket clerks to meatpackers to computer operators, were beginning to skyrocket.

The Labor Department recorded 73,000 cases of repetitive strain illness the year before Greenberg was hurt. Within three years, more than twice as many cases, 185,000, were reported in a year. Among office workers, the rate rose 150% between 1989 and 1990. By 1991, hand surgeons performed an estimated 100,000 operations a year to cure carpal tunnel syndrome, damage caused to tissues within the hand and arm caused by repetitive movement.

One day in late 1989, unemployed and still in a funk, Greenberg read a lengthy Los Angeles Times Magazine article in which a reporter described her battle with a computer-related arm ailment.

“I said: ‘Oh my God, I’m not crazy.’ ”

Gradually, she began to reinvent herself as an activist. She had received a $35,000 workers’ compensation settlement to reimburse her for the cost of her medical treatment. She invested about a quarter of it in a computer injury seminar. She purchased a 10,000-name business mailing list, invited experts and sent out solicitations.

She was flying by the seat of her pants.

“It was the biggest chance I’d ever taken, for a little girl who always just sat there and did her job,” she said.

She rented a conference room at a large hotel near Los Angeles International Airport. Timing was on her side: In San Francisco, the city’s Board of Supervisors had recently passed a groundbreaking ordinance requiring rest breaks and flexible chairs and desks for computer workers. It was the only one of its kind in the nation. Businesses were worried about the cost. Nearly 100 firms sent representatives to Greenberg’s seminar at $95 a pop. To her delight, she broke even.

She circulated her telephone number through VDT News and other organizations, and labor unions. She was a guest on several Los Angeles radio call-in shows. Calls from injured workers--distraught or angry or confused--began to trickle in.

She has received about 150 phone calls seeking assistance. She mails articles, refers workers to attorneys and turns down endorsement requests from makers of a wide variety of office safety products.

“I’m not getting the phone calls I used to,” she said. “The recession has pushed this underground. Workers are afraid to complain now.”

Rani Lueder, an Encino-based national ergonomics consultant to businesses, said she has seen the same pattern. Because of it, she said, “we’re going to see more people in the later stages (of computer-caused illnesses), and that’s when it’s extremely difficult to re-integrate them into their companies.”

Many of the people she talks to, Greenberg said, “don’t know what to do. They know their arms are hurting, their backs are hurting. They want to walk off their jobs. I have to rein them in. You just don’t leave a job, particularly in these times. Some of them haven’t told their bosses. They’re afraid. I’m not a person who feels all the bosses are out to get us. I just feel a lot of people aren’t educated.”

Many business leaders have been painfully educated in recent years by soaring costs attributable to computer-related injuries. Damage to wrist and hands is the fastest-growing category of workers’ compensation claims. Daytime television is filled with ads for workplace injury attorneys who make pointed reference to the dangers of computer work. This story was written on a computer system that was changed last year in the interest of safety so that most users automatically receive a “take-a-break” message every hour.

Politically, however, work safety advocates such as Greenberg have been striking out.

Many business lobbyists, backed by some medical specialists, continue to question whether there is a correlation between computer work and certain physical ailments. As a result, both the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration and California’s Division of Occupational Safety and Health have declined to adopt VDT safety regulations. San Francisco’s VDT law, which required employers to give computer workers a 15-minute break every two hours, was struck down last month by a judge who said California law gives only the state such power.

There is not a law on the books regulating VDT use, and that has become the focus of Greenberg’s world.

“My goal is to see a law passed,” she said. “I don’t know if it will happen in my lifetime. I’m not the person I was before I was hurt. I have more compassion but I don’t have as much patience.”