Ergonomics May Face Repetitive Resistance
In 1990, a Republican Labor secretary put ergonomics on the map by launching a drive for federal rules that would enlist employers in the quest to prevent what she called “one of the nation’s most debilitating across-the-board worker safety and health illnesses”: repetitive-motion injury.
This week, as the GOP-led Congress summarily killed the first federal ergonomic rules less than two months after they took effect, another Republican Labor secretary announced her intention to pursue “a comprehensive approach” on the issue that might, or might not, include a new rule-making attempt.
“Repetitive stress injuries are an important problem,” the new secretary acknowledged.
What happened in the decade between Elizabeth Hanford Dole’s bold pronouncement and Elaine Chao’s cautious one shows the immense challenges facing any future federal ergonomic initiative.
Throughout the rise and demise of federal ergonomic standards, adversaries--business vs. labor, Republicans vs. Democrats--have been talking past one another rather than finding common ground.
In particular, businesses large and small have grown enormously wary of any move by Washington to micro-manage their workplaces. That wariness grew to outrage in recent months as the Clinton administration, which inherited Dole’s initiative in 1993, finalized the ergonomic rules. The rallying cry of one influential group seeking to kill the rules, the National Federation of Independent Business, was “Stop ergo-nonsense!”
The Bush administration, if it wants to find compromise after its congressional victory in rolling back the regulations this week, may now have trouble persuading its business allies that government should play any role.
“Our members already have every incentive they would ever need, just through the pressures of the free market, to make their workplaces as safe and attractive as possible,” said Ed Frank, a spokesman for the business federation, which has 600,000 members with an average of five employees each.
Any day now, Bush is expected to sign legislation that passed the House and Senate on largely party-line votes to repeal the ergonomic standards that President Clinton issued in the final weeks of his administration.
But ergonomics--the study of how to adapt working conditions to workers--is a political and safety issue that won’t necessarily fade away.
At least 600,000 workers each year, according to government data, are forced to take time off work because of such injuries as carpal tunnel syndrome, tendinitis, back ailments and other conditions caused by repetitive, awkward or stressful motions that are known as musculoskeletal disorders. Many more, experts say, remain at work without reporting their injuries.
Dole, who served under the first President Bush, recognized the scope of the problem in her groundbreaking August 1990 announcement.
“We must do our utmost to protect workers from these hazards,” she said. “The department is committed to taking the most effective steps necessary to address the problems of ergonomic hazards on an industrywide basis.”
Experts say Dole’s words had profound effect. Ten years ago, according to William S. Marras, a professor of industrial engineering at Ohio State University and an expert on ergonomics, “people thought you were mispronouncing ‘economics.’ They know what it is now.”
If there was business opposition at the time, it was muted. Rules can take a long time to write, especially federal rules. Business groups were assured of having a hand in the final product under a Republican administration. But when the Democrats assumed power in 1993, labor unions gained influence over the rule making, and business opposition swelled.
In 1995, when Republicans took over Congress, business lobbyists led by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Assn. of Manufacturers began what would become a perennial campaign to stymie Clinton’s rule making by cutting off or limiting funds for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
Business groups and Republicans also demanded proof: Where, they asked, was the scientific evidence that linked repetitive-motion injuries to work? Congress commissioned two National Academy of Sciences studies. Both seemed to bolster the case for ergonomic intervention.
The latest was released Jan. 17, three days before Clinton left office. The 450-page report, assembled by 19 experts, found a “clear relationship” between back disorders and manual lifting, bending and twisting. And it found that repetition, force and vibration were “important work-related factors” for disorders of the arms and wrists. Well-designed intervention could help, it said.
But business groups seized on other parts of the study to argue that more research was needed. The George W. Bush administration even quoted one caveat from the study this week when it announced opposition to the rules: “None of the common musculoskeletal disorders is uniquely caused by work exposures.”
Experts who put the report together say the administration missed the point. “The question is, ‘Is there evidence that workplace exposures add significantly to the risk of these disorders?’ ” said Jeremiah A. Barondess, president of the New York Academy of Medicine, who chaired the expert panel. “The answer is, absolutely they do.”
Labor officials believe that there is nothing the Clinton administration could have done that would have quelled business complaints. “We’ve been through this for 10 years with these guys, and they oppose any ergonomic standards,” said Peg Seminario, safety expert with the AFL-CIO.
The regulations, nine pages long but with hundreds of pages of appendixes and explanatory material, gave foes plenty of ammunition on the floor of Congress. There was, for instance, a provision to compensate injured workers with 90% of their pay for 90 days if they are taken off the job. That rule was modified from a draft proposal to provide compensation for six months.
Still, Republicans and business groups attacked it relentlessly as a federal invasion of state workers’ compensation laws; labor groups said it was needed to encourage injured workers to step forward.
Other provisions that drew attack from business lobbyists were thresholds OSHA established for examining a workplace after employees have been injured--for example, do any employees type at a keyboard without a break for more than four hours per day? And OSHA’s rules did not exempt preexisting conditions; businesses took that to mean that an employee could sprain a back playing softball on Sunday and then claim an RSI on Monday.
Randel Johnson, vice president for labor at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, said business groups didn’t need to run a fancy media campaign. Most lawmakers were well versed on the issue after several recent votes. “We had a big, fat target that was easy to shoot at. We just went from office to office and made our case.”
Despite years of ceaseless conflict on ergonomics, Chao believes that there are areas of agreement between labor and business, said her spokesman, Stuart Roy. “She wants to get input from everybody on how best to move forward.” But he added it would be “premature” to set a timetable for action.
