America, What Happened?: Ergonomics: The Politics of Pain

In a recent, unofficial survey by Local 6201 members, 42 percent of service reps at AT&T's local service center in Fort Worth, Texas, suffered from repetitive strain injuries of the neck, shoulders or wrists, .

"That's outrageously high," said Local 6201 Health and Safety chair Joanne Wells, who with committee members Terry Covington and Guila Jackson has been working with management to improve the situation.

She knows the statistics are equally bad at call centers throughout the industry, at newspapers where data entry is a constant and on assembly lines where manufacturing workers for hours repeat the same or similar tasks.

In President Bush's first days in office, he eliminated a workplace ergonomics standard that CWA and other unions had worked more than 10 years to have implemented. It would have protected 1.8 million workers each year from musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs).

Said Wells, "Without mandates from the government, corporations are not willing to voluntarily take the actions necessary to protect their workers from injury." 

Today, besides the lack of an ergonomics standard, the Labor Department has made matters even worse by eliminating the reporting requirements that allow the government to track the magnitude of musculoskeletal injuries. There is no longer a category to check off these disorders on the log sheets for lost-time injuries that employers must file with OSHA. Employers can write that information in on the form themselves — if they choose to do so.

"The move (by OSHA) to change the definition and criteria for identifying and counting MSDs is part of an ongoing industry campaign," the AFL-CIO stated. "Opponents want to keep MSDs from being recorded so that the problem will simply disappear. They know as long as 600,000 serious MSDs are reported every year, there will be continued pressure for DOL and employers to act on the problem."

Concludes David LeGrande, CWA's occupational safety and health director, "The experience of our locals shows that repetitive strain injuries remain at an all-time high, but government statistics no longer reflect that truth."