Published December
2000
Rules
in place to prevent job-related injuries
By
Kathy Day
Herald Economy Writer
July 1, 2002, may
seem like a long way off, but companies facing new rules for workplace
ergonomics may find it arriving a lot sooner than they expected.
The new rules, enacted
May 26, require employers to follow specific guidelines designed to protect
workers from injury. They’ll be phased in over the next few years.
According
to the state Department of Labor and Industries, which is charged with
enforcing the new rules, on-the-job injuries can have a “devastating impact
on workers’ lives and livelihoods.”
The cardinal signs
and symptoms can include pain, motor weakness, sensory deficits and restrictions
in range of motion. The targeted injuries include those involving soft
tissues such as muscles, tendons, ligaments, joints, blood vessels and
nerves.
“These things are
accumulated over time — not (a) specific traumatic injury” from an accident
— Cameron Fischer, a state safety consultant, said during a recent workshop
for employers.
Ergonomic injuries
often are ignored when they first surface, said an occupational therapist
whose job is to help get people back to work after they’ve been diagnosed
with a work-related injury.
Stacee Minyard of
HealthSouth’s Hoyt Avenue clinic in Everett said that as she interviews
patients and “digs into their past,” she often finds they’ve been suffering
for a long time.
They’ve been “in
pain, not sleeping, dropping things or having trouble showering or washing
their hair because it hurts, for as long as six months” before informing
supervisors, she said.
About 80 percent
of the patients she treats have some sort of work-related injury, and
about 65 percent to 70 percent of those have repetitive motion or cumulative
trauma injuries.
Fischer says while
most people think of computers as the major culprit, that’s not necessarily
true. Workers most likely to sustain muscular or skeletal injuries are
those whose jobs require lifting heavy loads or performing repetitive
motions over extended time periods.
In Washington alone,
such job injuries prompt more than 50,000 claims a year, costing more
than $410 million in direct costs for treatment and lost time. Associated
costs raise that to more than $1 billion. That makes them the largest
category of injuries and illnesses affecting Washington workers.
Initially, the new
state rules will affect companies with 50 or more employees in 12 industries
where the injuries occur most often, such as construction.
In Snohomish, Skagit
and Whatcom counties, that’s about 80 employers, said Bob Zulke of Labor
and Industries. Statewide, there are about 600 such employers, but the
“second wave” of companies with 11 to 49 workers will be much larger.
A study estimates
that implementing the new rules will cost large employers about $28 per
employee, and small ones about $31.
“We don’t expect
you to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on equipment,” Fischer said.
“You need to think about options like job rotation. The intent is to see
if there’s a way to reduce the hazard.”
In some cases, use
of a $100 power screwdriver might help prevent an elbow injury that could
cost $4,000, he noted during his recent presentation.
The rules cover companies
with “caution zone jobs.”
For example, a person
who works with hands above the head or elbows above the shoulder for more
than two hours a day, such as a drywall installer, falls into the “awkward
posture” classification, as does a sawmill green-chain puller who grabs
new lumber and stacks it.
If companies don’t
have jobs in the caution zone, they need not worry about adhering to new
rules, Fischer said. If companies do have such jobs, they must meet two
requirements: conduct awareness education and evaluate their jobs for
hazards.
If they determine
hazards are present, they move to another level of the rules and must
reduce the hazard “to the degree economically and technologically feasible.”
Employers like Rick
Stewart of GBC Contractors Inc. in Tukwila, one of only three employers
who attended the state agency’s recent workshop, are concerned that some
jobs can’t be changed.
“How can you take
a carpenter and rotate his job every two hours? He’s doing the same motion.
If he’s not building something, he’s tearing it down,” he said.
Diana Arenz, regional
industrial coordinator for HealthSouth, said solutions other than job
rotation could include strengthening and conditioning programs. The stronger
and better-conditioned employee with a higher reserve often can tolerate
more and can perhaps delay or avoid tissue damage from repetitive motions,
she said.
Arenz encourages
employers to “take a little money now to save time later because it costs
more to deal with the claims, retrain and hire.”
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