Back killing you at work? Hands numb from too much typing at your temp job? Here's the story of how national standards to prevent these and other injuries were developed, but then abandoned by the Clinton Administration after pressure from industry and the Republican Congress.




BARBARA SILVERSTEIN

INTERVIEWED BY MARK GARDNER
THE FREE PRESS


It has been estimated that one in three worker's compensation dollars goes to treat workplace physical stress-related injuries called musculoskeletal disorders. Barbara Silverstein has been doing research on these injuries for the past 15 years, and in 1990 she started a workplace safety and health research program at the Washington State Department of Labor and Industries (DLI). In Nov. 1993 President Bill Clinton appointed her boss, Joe Dear, to the head of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). Dear asked Silverstein to go with him to spearhead the creation of ergonomics standards to help prevent these types of injuries (ergonomics is the science of fitting the job to the worker, not the worker to the job). She left OSHA in June after a plan to publish draft standards was dropped due to intense opposition from industry and the Congress. We discussed the extent of these problems, as well as the politics surrounding the abandonment of efforts to protect workers.

How extensive are these problems? What kinds of industries are they worst in?

I know that people call them repetitive stress or repetitive motion, but it's not just repetitiveness that causes the problem. There's a lot of tossing around at the national level about what kinds of numbers we're talking about here, and everyone looks at the BLS (Bureau of Labor Statistics) data to try and figure out what the magnitude is. But what we did at OSHA was extrapolate from Washington State Workers' Compensation data to the whole country. It turns out that this state has the best data, so we used it to estimate the extent of the problem nationally. So, if you look at back, upper extremity, and lower extremity disorders that are related to work postures and forces and repetitive motions and vibrations, we're talking about 2.7 million workers every year in this country with a musculoskeletal disorder. That is phenomenal. But if you look at BLS figures they show that there are about 700,000 per year in the country as a whole. Disorders of the low back have the highest incidence rate, followed by the upper extremities. Nursing home workers have the highest incidence rate of back problems due to lifting of any occupation. For carpal tunnel syndrome and tendonitis of the upper extremities, it goes across all industries but your highest rates still tend to be in manufacturing. This doesn't mean that these problems don't exist in the service industry. But the highest rates based on BLS data are amongst textile workers, even higher than meatpacking.

You certainly read a lot about repetitive strain from keyboards, perhaps because journalists tend to use those a lot. How extensive is that problem?

We don't have really good figures on that. The best guess from 1992 data is that 12 percent of upper extremity disorders were from keyboards. Nobody knows how good those figures are. One of the very interesting things that is happening right now in the House of Representatives is that they put an Appropriations rider for OSHA saying that for this current year OSHA cannot publish standards or guidelines. But for next year they're trying to prevent OSHA from requiring record keeping of ergonomics-related problems. I think that is relatively phenomenal, for now we can say, for example, that for 1993 the incidence rate is X, based on BLS record keeping. If employers are no longer required to keep records and turn in numbers for people who have musculoskeletal disorders, maybe we can claim that in this country we have solved the problems because they don't exist anymore. I think that is extremely scary. Destroy the information, don't collect it, and then claim that you have solved the problem.

What are the politics surrounding this issue? Obviously the Republicans don't like it, but can you discuss more specifically who the industries and lobbyists are who ganged up to prevent standards?

Representative Tom DeLay out of Texas has been the spearhead in the Congressional push to stop OSHA activities on ergonomic standards, and has been successful. Representative Joel Hefley (R - Colo.) has also been interesting in this endeavor, and so has Cass Ballenger (R - N.C.). UPS (United Parcel Service) has been relatively instrumental in organizing coalitions against an ergonomic standard at the federal level and in California, and in doing whatever they can to prevent anything from happening. The National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) had a Coalition on Ergonomics - one might say it was really a coalition against ergonomics - and the folks who were on that steering committee sent out a letter to all kinds of companies around the country asking for $5000 dollars from each in order to work to prevent the standard from ever seeing the light of day.
Dottie Strunk is the main lobbyist for UPS - and she was the acting Assistant Secretary for OSHA under the last administration. She is extremely active these days and is very successful on a number of issues that are really quite terrifying for the health and safety for workers. One of those is trying to get rid of the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health. I think it's another instance of "lets shoot the messenger." If we prevent health and safety research from being done, by eliminating this Institute, we no longer have any record keeping to let us know there is a problem.

Other than UPS, which other industries stand out as being particularly recalcitrant?

The trucking industry, represented by the American Trucking Association. There's another trade association that is called the Center for Office Technology and they represent IBM among others. IBM is the most vocal on this issue probably because there are all these liability cases against their keyboards. They've been pretty active. The AGC, the Association of General Contractors is also adamantly opposed, and they also happen to have a lot of musculoskeletal disorders in construction. It is true that in construction there is a real challenge over how to fix some of those jobs, but now is a good time to get started.

Meat packing is a bad area for repetitive strain. I read that 25 percent of poultry workers have problems.

Part of working on the ergonomic standards was to go to a number of plants around the country to see what was working and what wasn't. I went to a Tyson's chicken packing plant in Texas, and they had a pretty decent ergonomics program. The National Broilers Council were one of the few big player national associations that did not join NAM's coalition. Actually, I think it's because the way we developed the standards was to draw from what OSHA has already done in enforcing safe practices in poultry and meatpacking. They know they have a problem, big time. They have a long way to go, no question about it, but I've been in a bunch of poultry plants around the country doing research prior to going to OSHA and I think they recognize they have massive problems, and at least some of them are beginning to deal with it.

Why did the Clinton administration backtrack? If I were a party strategist I would say that the people who would benefit from such standards are exactly the kind of workers the Democrats need to attract - younger workers, workers in the new service industries, as well as workers in the blue collar industries. Wouldn't this be a perfect place to draw a line in the sand?

One might think so. It's not necessarily Clinton per se. I think Secretary of Labor Reich thinks there still needs to be some kind of an ergonomic standard, even if a standard of the breadth I think necessary may not happen in this administration. The Democrats lost the Congress, and since the problems are so large there was going to be a very widespread organized opposition. There was a problem about the survival of OSHA as a whole. How do you get something out to protect workers in this type of climate? Tom DeLay and others put statements into the Congressional record, speaking on the floor of the House, reading what they believed was a quote from me. They said that I was an out of control bureaucrat, and that they were going to teach OSHA and me a lesson and cut another 3.5 million dollars out of OSHA's budget. That's a pretty clear message.

What are the ergonomics standards like in Washington state right now? Are they strong enough?

There aren't any. Right now it falls under the 'general duty clause', which requires that the employer provide a healthy and safe working environment for every working man or woman.... The Subcommittee on Appropriations in the House is trying to put in language that says no state - there are 23 states that have state plans like Washington state, and that are half-funded by the feds - that no federal money that goes to the states can be used in the development or promulgation of an ergonomic standard.
Why do you need a standard anyway if you have the general duty clause? The issue is that as long as you don't have the standard, then the employer never really knows if they are in compliance until they are inspected, because you don't have enough guidance about what is expected of you. In my view, what this Congressional action is doing is preventing a public standard-setting process from ever taking place, and who wins in all of this is the lobbyists. We need an ergonomic standard, and every day that we delay - that's a pun, because Tom DeLay is mainly pushing it - at least another thousand workers are going to have a musculoskeletal disorder that could have been prevented.

Workplace Safety Facts

Since 1970 when the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) was created, the workplace fatality rate dropped:
Since 1970, the injury rate dropped:
Still, on an average day: Current annual costs to Americans for the following programs:
(Source: UFCW Action)




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Contents on this page were published in the August/September, 1995 edition of the Washington Free Press.
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Mark Gardner