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After a decade of repetitive political jostling, in January U.S. workers finally
won workplace protections to prevent crippling ergonomic injuries. Weeks
later, they saw these protections yanked away by President George Bush
in one of the new administration’s first substantive pieces of legislation.
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s (OSHA) ergonomics
standard was issued in November 2000 and went into effect on January 16.
But business opponents, including the National Association of Manufacturers
(NAM) and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, convinced their Congressional
allies to rescind the new worker protection rules after less than a dozen
hours of consideration.
The Bush administration’s position statement on the ergonomics standard
reads like it was lifted from the Chamber of Commerce’s position.
President Bush says “the rule would have applied a bureaucratic one-size-fits-all
solution to a broad range of employers and workers –– not good
government at work.”
OSHA’s proposed rules would have required businesses to provide
workers with basic information about common musculoskeletal disorders
(MSDs), including risk factors associated with MSDs and the importance
of early recognition of symptoms. Once an employee reported an MSD, companies
would also have been required to take further steps to evaluate whether
or not workplace factors –– including repetition and force —
pose MSD hazards. Such hazards would have then been eliminated or controlled.
“From the start, OSHA was wrong on the substance and wrong on the
process, and we couldn’t be more pleased that Congress has voted
to scrap this expensive and unworkable rule,” Jerry Jasinowski, NAM’s
president said the night the House of Representatives voted to overturn
the regulation under the Congressional Review Act. The Congressional Review
Act, passed in 1996, enables Congress to rescind executive branch-issued
regulations through a joint resolution of disapproval (JRD). Unless the
President vetoes a JRD, the regulations are treated as if they had never
been issued, and may not be repromulgated in the same form unless a law
is passed subsequent to the JRD.
Throughout the 10-year struggle to pass the ergonomics rule, OSHA has
been hamstrung by Congressional budget restrictions limiting its ability
to work on the rule, while agreeing numerous times to delay issuing the
rule until repeated calls for more scientific evidence could be satisfied.
Work on the ergonomics standard began more than a decade ago under the
first Bush administration, when Secretary of Labor Elizabeth Dole was
convinced that enough evidence already existed to demonstrate the need
for workplace ergonomics standards.
“These painful and sometimes crippling illnesses now make up 48
percent of all recordable industrial workplace illnesses,” Dole said
in announcing work on the rule in 1990. “We must do our utmost to
protect workers from these hazards, not only in the red meat industry
but all U.S. industries.” Dole pledged that the Department of Labor
was “committed to taking the most effective steps necessary to address
the problem of ergonomic hazards on an industry-wide basis.”
The Labor Department went on to develop educational and outreach programs
on ergonomics and held several stakeholder meetings to receive broad input
before drafting the rules.
Although a comprehensive 1997 National Institute of Occupational Safety
and Health report on “Musculoskeletal Disorders and Workplace Factors”
concluded that “a large body of credible epidemiological research
exists that shows a consistent relationship between MSDs and certain physical
factors,” NAM and Congressional allies continued to argue for the
need for further study. The National Academy of Science (NAS) ended up
releasing two additional reports –– one in 1998 and one in 2001
–– confirming that musculoskeletal disorders are caused by workplace
exposures to heavy lifting, repetition, force and vibration and “interventions
incorporating elements of OSHA’s ergonomics standard have been proven
to protect workers from ergonomic hazards.”
As the evidence piled up, industry front groups such as the National
Coalition on Ergonomics began to shift emphasis, suggesting that OSHA’s
completed rules would be too expensive to implement.
“There needs to be a balance between and an understanding of the
costs and benefits associated with federal regulations,” President
Bush agreed. “In this instance, though, in exchange for uncertain
benefits, the ergonomics rule would have cost both large and small employers
billions of dollars and presented employers with overwhelming compliance
challenges.”
While OSHA says the expected cost of the rule would be about $4.5 billion
per year, the agency estimates that the rule would prevent 4.6 million
MSDs in the first 10 years, bringing $9.1 billion in total annual savings.
NAM, citing the Small Business Association, says the rule would have
cost industries $18 billion per year, $6.7 billion of which would be paid
by small and medium-sized manufacturers, some of whom they claim would
be “financially crippled” by the rule.
The NAS estimates that each year one million people take time away from
work to treat and recover from MSD pain or functional impairment, while
MSDs account for an estimated 70 million physician office visits. The
annual economic burden of MSDs, as measured by compensation costs, lost
wages and lost productivity, is about $50 billion.
“This is a president who said, as a candidate, ‘judge me by
my record,’” says AFL-CIO President John Sweeney.
“The record is clear,” Sweeney says. “The first substantive
legislation signed by President George Bush is a rollback by Congress
of a health and safety standard — the first in OSHA’s 30-year
history.”
“Ergonomic injuries are our nation’s biggest workplace safety
problem,” Sweeney says.
“Killing this worker safety standard will result in hundreds of
thousands more such injuries.”
Each day there is no ergonomics standard, more than 4,900 workers are
injured by ergonomic hazards at work.
Deborah Weinstock works in the Occupational Safety
and Health Department of the AFL-CIO.
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