State Unveils Scaled-Back Standard for Ergonomics : Health: Employers hail proposal to combat repetitive motion injuries. Safety advocates, labor leaders call it weak.

Acting to curb carpal tunnel and other widespread repetitive motion injuries, state officials unveiled a proposal Friday that would prod thousands of employers to consider such steps as providing extra work breaks and slowing down assembly lines.

The proposed California ergonomics standard--which is expected to be adopted after some tinkering--is vastly scaled down from a plan rejected a year ago by the California Occupational Safety and Health Standards Board. Still, the plan would be the first comprehensive standard in the country aimed at combatting injuries from repetitive motions, the nation’s fastest-growing category of occupational ailments.

Initial reaction from employers--many of whom would be effectively excluded from the standard, while others would have broad discretion in dealing with injury problems--generally was upbeat. But workplace safety advocates and union officials, who once had high hopes that California would impose far-reaching requirements on all employers, were bitter.

The proposal was mandated by the state Legislature in 1993 as part of a package of reforms to overhaul California’s workers’ compensation insurance system. The intent was to cut employers’ high workers’ compensation costs by reducing painful repetitive motion injuries, which afflict everyone from meat packers to cashiers and include such ailments as tendinitis and muscle strains.

Nationally, more than 300,000 workers suffer repetitive motion injuries each year. In California during 1993, the most recent year for which figures are available, 28,000 workers reported repetitive motion problems.

Over the past year, however, government-imposed ergonomic proposals triggered fierce opposition in Sacramento and Washington. Critics argue that too little is known about ways to prevent repetitive motion injuries to justify imposing expensive measures.

Under pressure from Republicans in Congress, the Clinton Administration largely abandoned its efforts to develop an ergonomics program this year. The Cal/OSHA board killed its initial plan last year and appeared ready to drop the effort until a labor-backed group won a court order forcing the state to adopt a plan.

A key point of dispute between business and labor over the new state proposal is that the plan would apply only in workplaces where at least two employees in a given year are diagnosed with similar repetitive motion injuries. The old proposal would have required all employers to take such preventive measures as evaluating work sites and injury records to spot potential ergonomic hazards.

John MacLeod, executive officer of the Cal/OSHA standards board, said the panel took its approach because of “the lack of scientific consensus” over how to deal with repetitive motion injuries.

“The regulatory focus is on where the problems exist. They don’t impose a burden unless there is a problem,” he said.

Under the proposal, employers with at least two injured workers would be required to provide special training to affected workers. Employers also would have to assess work sites to determine the cause of the problem.

The proposal also says employers “shall consider,” among other things, redesigning workstations and such actions as rotating job duties, changing the pace of work and adding work breaks.

By the board’s rough estimates, up to 14,000 workplaces--fewer than 2% of the nearly 900,000 workplaces in the state--would trigger the “two-injury” threshold. MacLeod emphasized, however, that no industries would be exempted from the program.

Julianne A. Broyles, head of a coalition of California employers seeking a business-friendly ergonomics standard, called the new plan a “sincere effort” by the board to avoid unnecessary requirements.

“You have to have a problem in your workplace before you’re required to do anything, so you don’t have all the employers in California having to do a massive revamp,” Broyles said.

But the board, all of whose seven members are Republicans, also came under sharp criticism from union officials such as Keith R. Mestrich, an occupational safety and health specialist for the AFL-CIO in Washington. “It’s the ‘sit back and wait until you have a problem’ standard, rather than a proactive ‘go out and prevent injuries’ standard, which is what safety and health standards are supposed to be all about,” Mestrich said.

He added that the proposal has “the weakest possible language you could put in a standard.” He cited a passage that says if an ergonomic hazard is “not capable of being corrected,” then it should be “minimized to the extent feasible.”

That wording, Mestrich said, “would make it very difficult for Cal/OSHA to cite any employer ever” for not correcting an ergonomics hazard.

The board will hold two public hearings before adopting a proposal. The first hearing will be Jan. 18 at the Airport Marina Resort Hotel in Los Angeles.