In My Opinion: A Story of Politics and Pain

The AFL-CIO maintains on its website a running count of the number of workers estimated to have suffered repetitive strain injuries (RSI) since President Bush killed the federal workplace ergonomic standar d last March.
I checked it the day of Bush’s “recess appointment” of Eugene Scalia to be the Labor Department’s top lawyer. The count was 1,437,337 new workers with crippling ailments such as carpal tunnel syndrome in the past 10 months.

Scalia, of course, is most noted (aside from being Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s son) for calling ergonomics — which is the science of designing workplaces to fit human beings — “quackery” and “junk science par excellence.”

Scalia at that time represented business clients who sought to block the OSHA ergonomic standard, issued in 2000, which required employers to correct ergonomic problems. He wrote in a Wall Street Journal guest column that unions just wanted employers to give workers more rest breaks so that more jobs would be created.

Making Scalia the Labor Department’s solicitor general, charged with enforcing worker protection laws, puts the proverbial fox in the chicken coop.

The OSHA ergonomic standard was developed over 10 years, beginning in the administration of Bush the Elder under Labor Secretary Elizabeth Dole. When it was scuttled last year, current Labor Secretary Elaine Chao promised that there would be a comprehensive ergonomic plan to take its place.

No plan has been forthcoming — but Scalia’s appointment as Labor’s solicitor general speaks volumes about this administration’s position on ergonomics. And so does the fact that Bush had to resort to the recess appointment loophole, circumventing the Senate confirmation process. It was clear the Senate would never okay this nomination.

Repetitive strain injuries make up the biggest category of workplace health problems — about 1.8 million cases a year.
It is precisely because these injuries are such a huge problem that powerful business interests want to do nothing about it. Many studies have shown that RSI can be prevented by redesigning work stations and job patterns, but that would cost employers a lot of money.

Meanwhile, people like Kathy Jalbert, a former TV news editor and NABET-CWA member in New York, had to leave a job she loved because of constant “shooting, burning electricity down my arms.” She is permanently disabled, “and it affects my whole life.”

And Becky Hogue, a Pacific Bell directory operator and Local 9410 member in San Francisco, has battled with job-related carpal tunnel syndrome for years. “I’ve had to give up knitting and sometimes I have trouble even turning a door knob or reading a book,” she says.

And Debra Teske, another CWA member crippled at her keyboard, testified to the need for an ergonomics standard in late 2000. A Verizon service rep from Landover, Md., she described the effects of carpal tunnel syndrome: “Anything you can imagine that you reach and grab and grip with your hands, it hurts. Gripping a steering wheel, washing your hair, grabbing a doorknob, slicing in the kitchen, it hurts.” She had to give up her favorite hobbies, gardening, bicycling and kayaking.

These members represent tens of thousands of workers who are victims of the administration’s indifference.

The U.S. Supreme Court dealt another blow to workers’ efforts to make employers accountable for ergonomic problems. A recent decision limited the scope of the Americans with Disabilities Act, stating that an auto worker who sued her employer for refusing to accommodate her disability, carpal tunnel syndrome, by giving her a job she could perform wasn’t covered by the ADA.

Justice Sandra Day O’Connor authored the court’s opinion, overturning a lower court judge who had ruled for the auto worker based solely on her disability at work. Said O’Connor, that didn’t prove a degree of impairment that “restricts the individual from doing activities that are central to most people’s lives.” As if earning a paycheck isn’t central to one’s life.

O’Connor’s opinion suggested the lower court should have looked specifically at this worker’s limitations in other areas, such as “household chores, bathing and brushing one’s teeth.” These cloistered judges apparently don’t know that it goes without saying — a worker disabled by carpal tunnel syndrome is plagued by pain when doing any physical task, at home or at work. When I read that, I thought of one of our members who once tearfully told me that her condition prevented her from brushing her granddaughter’s hair. And that is certainly a central life activity to me.

It is clear that workers suffering from crippling repetitive strain injuries aren’t going to receive any sympathy or help from this administration, or from this Supreme Court, two of the three branches of government.

That only leaves the Congress as an avenue for restating the original intent of the ADA and for passing legislation mandating an ergonomics standard with enforcement powers over employers. And that means electing members to Congress this year who will stand up for working families over the protests of the business lobbies.