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Fight for Ergonomic Rule Re-ignites on Capitol Hill
CWA is joining with the AFL-CIO to push for a genuine ergonomics standard in the wake of the Bush administration’s announcement of a plan that will support only voluntary guidelines for employers — meaning no required protections for workers and no enforcement.
Labor is backing a bill introduced April 17 by Sen. John Breaux (D-La.) that would require the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to develop a comprehensive ergonomics standard within two years. Breaux proposed a similar bill last year when President Bush killed the ergonomics rule that was adopted after 10 years of research and input from labor and industry.
The new White House plan for voluntary guidelines won’t require most employers to do anything about poorly designed work areas and fails even to define a repetitive stress injury. Nearly 2 million workers every year — from jobs in offices to assembly lines to hospitals — are injured due to poor ergonomics. A third of them suffer crippling injuries.
“We are outraged but not surprised by the administration’s failure to safeguard workers,” CWA Executive Vice President Larry Cohen said. “Let’s be clear: Guidelines aren’t regulations. And no regulations mean no enforcement, no rule with any teeth to require businesses to do what’s right.”
Noting false promises and delays on ergonomic safety, Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) called Labor Secretary Elaine Chao before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions on April 18, a session that drew several hundred union members. Most spectators — many with “Stop the Pain” T-shirts and buttons — had to listen from an adjacent room because the crowd was so large.
Kennedy, chair of the committee, said an estimated 1.8 million workers have suffered job-related ergonomic injuries over the past year. “Many of these injuries could have been prevented if this administration had acted as promised,” he said. “Sadly, the long-awaited plan of action falls short of protecting America’s workers. It is not the ‘comprehensive approach’ promised by the president and the secretary over a year ago. In fact, it is really only a plan to come up with a plan.”
Kennedy, Sen. Paul Wellstone (D-Minn.), Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) and others told Chao that voluntary programs had been tried for years without success, and asked her why she thought her plan would be any different.
Chao said hers is more comprehensive than past efforts and pledged that employers who refuse to fix ergonomic hazards would face penalties under language in OSHA’s general duty clause. But she acknowledged that guidelines themselves don’t require action and repeatedly claimed that an ergonomics rule with the power of enforcement isn’t necessary.
Senators concerned about worker safety were unimpressed. “The reason the rule was adopted was that everything else had been tried,” Clinton said, referring to the standard the White House threw out shortly after Bush took office.
Wellstone said enforcement under the general duty clause “is lengthy, burdensome, expensive, resource-intensive and, most importantly, not a preventive tool.” He said further that the plan Chao is advocating is a “hollow shell” that “actually turns the clock back to before the first Bush administration.”
The now-defunct ergonomics rule was issued at the end of the Clinton administration and developed in bipartisan fashion, beginning more than 10 years earlier under Republican Labor Secretary Elizabeth Dole. A wealth of research on ergonomics — a field in which CWA was a pioneer — has produced proof of debilitating job-related injuries from repetitive stress, strain and other factors.
Wellstone challenged OSHA’s plan to establish an advisory committee to look for gaps in ergonomics research. “Is the real goal here to create a forum for those who continue to claim there is no science behind ergonomics and that repetitive stress injuries simply result from workers’ inability to ‘cope?’” he said.
In a statement issued the day of the hearing, AFL-CIO President John Sweeney said the OSHA plan is a step backward.
“It is an even worse insult to workers than it was originally thought when it was released on April 5,” he said, noting that newly released government statistics show that ergonomic-related injuries in high risk industries are on the rise. “The bottom line is that workers go to their jobs every day and face an epidemic of preventable injuries — an epidemic that is not improving despite the Bush administration’s claims.”
Labor is backing a bill introduced April 17 by Sen. John Breaux (D-La.) that would require the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to develop a comprehensive ergonomics standard within two years. Breaux proposed a similar bill last year when President Bush killed the ergonomics rule that was adopted after 10 years of research and input from labor and industry.
The new White House plan for voluntary guidelines won’t require most employers to do anything about poorly designed work areas and fails even to define a repetitive stress injury. Nearly 2 million workers every year — from jobs in offices to assembly lines to hospitals — are injured due to poor ergonomics. A third of them suffer crippling injuries.
“We are outraged but not surprised by the administration’s failure to safeguard workers,” CWA Executive Vice President Larry Cohen said. “Let’s be clear: Guidelines aren’t regulations. And no regulations mean no enforcement, no rule with any teeth to require businesses to do what’s right.”
Noting false promises and delays on ergonomic safety, Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) called Labor Secretary Elaine Chao before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions on April 18, a session that drew several hundred union members. Most spectators — many with “Stop the Pain” T-shirts and buttons — had to listen from an adjacent room because the crowd was so large.
Kennedy, chair of the committee, said an estimated 1.8 million workers have suffered job-related ergonomic injuries over the past year. “Many of these injuries could have been prevented if this administration had acted as promised,” he said. “Sadly, the long-awaited plan of action falls short of protecting America’s workers. It is not the ‘comprehensive approach’ promised by the president and the secretary over a year ago. In fact, it is really only a plan to come up with a plan.”
Kennedy, Sen. Paul Wellstone (D-Minn.), Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) and others told Chao that voluntary programs had been tried for years without success, and asked her why she thought her plan would be any different.
Chao said hers is more comprehensive than past efforts and pledged that employers who refuse to fix ergonomic hazards would face penalties under language in OSHA’s general duty clause. But she acknowledged that guidelines themselves don’t require action and repeatedly claimed that an ergonomics rule with the power of enforcement isn’t necessary.
Senators concerned about worker safety were unimpressed. “The reason the rule was adopted was that everything else had been tried,” Clinton said, referring to the standard the White House threw out shortly after Bush took office.
Wellstone said enforcement under the general duty clause “is lengthy, burdensome, expensive, resource-intensive and, most importantly, not a preventive tool.” He said further that the plan Chao is advocating is a “hollow shell” that “actually turns the clock back to before the first Bush administration.”
The now-defunct ergonomics rule was issued at the end of the Clinton administration and developed in bipartisan fashion, beginning more than 10 years earlier under Republican Labor Secretary Elizabeth Dole. A wealth of research on ergonomics — a field in which CWA was a pioneer — has produced proof of debilitating job-related injuries from repetitive stress, strain and other factors.
Wellstone challenged OSHA’s plan to establish an advisory committee to look for gaps in ergonomics research. “Is the real goal here to create a forum for those who continue to claim there is no science behind ergonomics and that repetitive stress injuries simply result from workers’ inability to ‘cope?’” he said.
In a statement issued the day of the hearing, AFL-CIO President John Sweeney said the OSHA plan is a step backward.
“It is an even worse insult to workers than it was originally thought when it was released on April 5,” he said, noting that newly released government statistics show that ergonomic-related injuries in high risk industries are on the rise. “The bottom line is that workers go to their jobs every day and face an epidemic of preventable injuries — an epidemic that is not improving despite the Bush administration’s claims.”