Ergonomic Rule Would Be Pain With No Gain

Would you buy an expensive medicine just because the guy down the street said it was sure to make you feel better? Probably not. But California is about to get a very expensive prescription, with about the same assurance of results.

The “guy down the street” in this case is the standards board of Cal-OSHA. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration board, acting on instructions from the Legislature, has approved an ergonomic regulation that supposedly is intended to reduce repetitive stress injuries on the job. The regulation would require employers with 10 or more workers to provide special training to injured workers and others handling the same task. It also recommends, but does not require, other corrective measures, such as rest breaks and improved keyboards.

But physicians who treat these injuries, such as carpal tunnel syndrome, say we don’t know what causes them or how to prevent them. So we have a “prescription,” courtesy of professional bureaucrats, for a condition that medical professionals still don’t understand. And when I say this prescription is expensive, I mean billions of dollars to implement it.

This is what Dr. William McMaster, president of the California Orthopaedic Assn., had to say earlier this year about the prospect of an ergonomic regulation:

“It is possible that any regulations issued right now might place significant burdens on employers without assuring any appreciable benefits in return, either for employees or for the public. It might require employers to expend resources on new equipment, retooling or redesign. We might well find, after making those changes, that some employees are still developing repetitive stress injuries and some are not, just as it happens today.”

“Unfortunately,” Dr. Stephen Katz testified before Congress, “we are not at that stage where we can promulgate certain suggestions in terms of what we should do to treat patients with repetitive motion disorders . . . [and]. . . we are a long way away from knowing the best medical management.”

It’s a subject about which Katz is particularly knowledgeable in his capacity as director of the National Institute of Arthritis, Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases, one of the National Institutes of Health.

Katz and McMaster call for more medical research into the causes, cures and preventive measures for these injuries. The National Federation of Independent Business agrees with that solution, as do many other doctors and, I believe, most of the public. We don’t have a scientific answer to the simple question: Why, when two people work side by side, doing the same job, does one of them get a repetitive stress injury and the other not? Until we have that answer, any regulation would be premature.

But while the doctors are cautious, preferring to make a diagnosis before prescribing a cure, the bureaucrats in Sacramento have been eager to rush in. The result is a regulation of uncertain medical benefit, but quite definite cost. An economic impact study of an earlier version of this regulation found that the cost to California could run to nearly 12,000 jobs and $10 billion.

Certainly we could spend our money more wisely. We could encourage employers and employees to work together in the search for remedies that make sense in specific workplaces. Many employers are already looking for answers that fit their workplaces and workers. But so long as those workers and workplaces vary so greatly, a one-size-fits-all regulation cannot be the answer.

We can repeal this premature regulation before it goes into effect and return to sound medical principle: diagnosis before cure. Keeping this regulation in place requires Californians to pay a terrible price, the potential loss of thousands of jobs and billions of dollars, without a guarantee that even a single injury would be prevented.