NOTE: This document is provided for historical purposes only.
Question and Answer Session
MS. HIRSCHBERG: This is an opportunity for any questions, comments, concerns you may have of the speakers. From the audience? Yes, in the back?
Q : I have a question for Ms. Sater. Can you hear me all right?
MS. SATER: You are fine.
Q : You mentioned -- you showed a sewing machine with some arm supports.
MS. SATER: Yes. The arm supports.
Q : I didn't really understand that. Could you explain that a little bit more?
MS. SATER: Okay. The arm supports are on a pulley overhead or a weight. That can be adjusted based on your height and what you are holding. The arm support, you just slide them in there, and your elbow is bare in there. It just helps hold the weight up, because when you are working with a size 12 men's boot that is insulated, you are holding probably 4 or 5 pounds of boot there. It is real heavy and awkward, and you are having to muscle it around. So you are just sliding your arms in there, and it just helps hold it up for you.
They originally, I believe, were a Danish or Swedish company that we bought them from. And then one of our factory workers started making the slings herself because she got bored with them all being navy blue. So -- if you are interested, I can find out who they come from.
Q : Thank you.
MS. HIRSCHBERG: Yes?
Q : How do you accomplish the job rotation with piece rate workers?
MS. SATER: You go off piece work.
Q : You did that in collective bargaining?
MS. HIRSCHBERG: Collective bargaining. We went off the piece work. I am not sure if Peter did, but yes. What we did was our workers, they worked for I think it was like three, four months. We kept closer track on their piece rate, and they got what is called a red circle rate. That is just what we called it.
So your piece work rate was locked in. So when you went off piece work and on job rotation, you continued to receive that piece work rate that you had been working at prior to it. Then as new workers come in, they are more on a standard hourly rate.
Q : Peter, I have a question for you. I would like to know what tricks or motivation you had when you were able to convince management that they really needed to deal with their program.
Obviously, if you take a look at our comp claims, there was a red signal going up that something needed to be done. They were resistant to getting involved in relation to time and money, but certainly we knew that there was a problem. They are not totally insensitive.
Once the project got started and you could see the difference with the attitude of the workers, I don't think there was too much needed to motivate management from continuing. They didn't get as much involved as they did allow me to continue my involvement.
Q : Thank you.
MS. KELLOGG: I want to add to that, I mean, quite frankly, we were actively hoping that OSHA would be taking a serious look at an ergonomic standard. This is a couple of years ago. When I documented the level of injury in that one department with the 80 spoolers, it was pretty overwhelming documentation. There were very few people who were not injured or hurting. (I told the company that this could be a problem if OSHA were looking at ergonomics in the factory.)
You know, we said, "Look. We've got money to help you. So why not get ahead of the game? You wouldn't want to have to deal with this later down the road when the problem is more serious and the injuries are worse." I think that was persuasive.
MR. MEYER: I think it's true, the fact that the union was willing to take on some of the responsibility for getting this program off the ground helped. I think it is important that a company has the involvement of either something like the CAF fund or the union.
Q : I work for a large chemical company. My challenge is that, until recently, we were not having the incident rate that warranted showing the dollar figures. Now after about five years, if we looked at the increase in the number of particularly office ergonomic-related carpal tunnel/tendinitis cases, now I can probably put together a couple dollar figures just with two or three employees this year that will do the same thing that you are saying.
I guess I was curious if there is anything for folks more on a proactive side of things that you could say that might be able to help out, instead of having to be so reactionary. Again, that was our standpoint, too, where I am at, is we are hoping that OSHA was going to do something. That was going to be our push, but that didn't help us.
MS. SATER: : A proactive -- I don't know how many facilities you have, but I wrote my master's thesis on what effect does charging back your workers' compensation have on the actions of the company. I have designed three or four different systems at different companies, because you have to tailor it to where you work. I used the airline because that's where I started from scratch and had all the data.
Believe me, once you start hitting an individual plant supervisor's bonus with those costs, they get religion really quick.
Q : That's what it took in my inventory management group. He personally got carpal tunnel syndrome. And that convinced him. And now he is my swing point for the rest of them. But I guess I was just curious. You know, besides just the raw data of the money and figures, is there anything, any other magic you could put in there, or is that -- that was it. That was their language that they wanted to hear.
MR. MEYER: I mean, consider the first lady you saw in the video is working in our company 26 years. These are a lot of people that have been living in this company for a lot of years, including the owners. So again, I think it may be important to take the owners, or the people that are giving you the resistance, down on the shop floor and show them where it is happening.
MS.SATER: : I will just mention one other thing. I asked the supervisors to sit down in the class. And the first thing they did was sit in the class and mind the job. I asked them to sit there and do this while we were teaching, so that they could start to experience it, those who hadn't before. That was helpful in terms of their recognizing the problem.
Thank you.
Q : I don't know if I need the microphone, but Pat Hirschberg is being very quiet. Would you like to tell us your story about the chairs as far as the motivator?
MS. HIRSCHBERG: Yes. Kathy, who has just asked the question, has been in partnership with Oshkosh in getting our ergonomic program started, and getting the message to our upper management. We knew that chairs was going to be one of the first things we wanted to address and we would get the attention of every employee in the facilities.
So the first ergonomic corporate meeting we had in bringing all of our leaders of our companies together was in a boardroom on the sewing machine steel metal chairs. And they sat on those chairs for eight hours. They were all given a cushion or a pillow to adjust during the day. By the end of the day, we had a signed request for approximately 3,500 ergonomic chairs.
So I think it is putting some fun into getting the attention of the equipment and putting managers in the same positions that your workers are out on the floor, if that will give you any ideas.
MR. MEYER: I would just like to mention, I talked earlier about traditional management as far as a manufacturing facility is concerned. There was a time when workers were trying to bring out pillows from their locker room to put on these hard metal chairs, and we didn't allow them. We wouldn't allow them to store pillows in their locker.
So, you know, if you take a look at the way things follow, I mean, there is a lot that will tell people what is actually going on.
Q : I have one more question, and I am not sure who would be the best to answer it. But how do you retrofit these really old sewing machines that -- you know, the old black metal kind? If getting a new one is completely out of the question, is there a way to go back in and -- have you had any experience modifying those things?
MS. SATER: We have machines that are dating back from the 1920s in our factory, and we are still using them. But the sewing machines themselves, I think the biggest change we made on them was tilting them, like you saw in the one slide.
But the machines themselves, we have put some of them up on posts so they are sewing up on a post versus down low. And some of it is just a matter of putting it on a height adjustable table so that they are not sitting, but they are standing doing it.
I think that body bar thing, I mentioned the table was like $700. I think that body bar was like $350, something like that. So it is not so much the sewing machine that we changed. We just made it so it is up or down, back and forth for the operator, because you can't change the machine a whole lot.
MR. MEYER: I think we had a similar problem. We have a mending department that also has quite old machine heads. And the problem was not the sewing machine. We redid the tables. We put in a foot rest for the left foot, and we did something about the lighting.
But those three components -- and again, we then purchased ergonomic adjustable chairs that are made just for sewing. It is completely different from the chairs you saw there. We purchased 18 of those chairs for 18 workers that were sitting at a sewing machine all day.
But again, the table size, the foot rest and the lighting was extremely helpful.
MS. SATER: There has been a lot of other things that we have done, and we don't have enough time for the video, but we had one operation where they were using scissors a lot to cut off the little strings. Well, instead of the scissors, we put a little heat gun there. So now they just grab the string and go zzt, and the heat breaks it off. And no, they don't burn their fingers, surprisingly. But they are no longer having to cut these heavy threads off. We are zapping them off with a little heat unit.
We had operations where we used to think you could only glue the edge of a piece of something. So somebody was standing there all day long running this through to glue the edge. We said, "Big deal. Let's roll the whole thing through there, and you don't have to twist it around." So now we just glue the whole surface. It is no big deal. It is inside the boot. So now they just run it through rollers, so there is none of this twisting things around anymore.
We had one big machine, and everyone kept hitting their head on it. Well, we stood there and looked at it. We raised it up a foot off the ground. Now 90 percent -- and it was angle iron out of our maintenance shop. That's where we do most of our stuff. It is like -- I mean, the microphone stands here go up and down. Why can't you make things on a post go up or down just with pegs?
We use a lot of hydraulic lifts for our stuff, put those things in there, bring the product up to the person so they don't have to bend down and do it.
In our tannery we have guys throwing 2,000 hides of leather a day. A wet hide weighs 60 pounds. That's heavy work, a lot of bad shoulders. It used to be you had to grab them from up here at the start of the pile and grab them from off the floor at the bottom. You put a simple little scissor lift in there, they are always doing it from their waist. And those guys rotate the jobs all the time now.
Simple things that don't cost a lot of money make a big, big difference.
MR. BROADNAX: I would just like to echo, too, what the panel is saying. Two of the plants that I service are sewing factories now, and they have gotten the chairs and gotten the machines that adjust up and down. It has helped tremendously. You know, there wasn't anything major that you had to do like going out buying new machinery, but simply making it adjustable to the height of the worker. We haven't had too many problems with tendinitis or repetitive motion.
Q : I just wanted to -- there were some others. Go ahead.
Q : I was just going to say that, Roosevelt, in your presentation you talked about how you went from another health and safety pattern into ergonomics. I was going to ask the other panelists if, using the worker involvement model in ergonomics has helped other health and safety problems in your plants using that model.
MS. SATER: Just the worker involvement standpoint of it, I think, because in safety committees, because they are the ones that have to work on the machines. Our maintenance folks are the guys and gals that do most of it, but with the input from the workers. Then when it gets on to other issues, I think they come to us quicker with things that are wrong, sometimes too often. But, you know, they will let us know when -- I think in Peter's plant they could probably -- they have been working with this stuff so long, they can tell by feel if something is wrong. They don't even have to see it.
The same thing with the leather. They can feel if something is wrong with it or it smells different. I don't know if you use adhesives and stuff in your facility, but, you know, if a vendor changes something, our people know about it immediately. That has helped because they are coming to people, because they know we are going to try and do something about it right away.
MR. MEYER: I think in our case once we got involved in the ergonomics program and involved 100 workers who were involved in having things to say and opinions, in a small factory, news travels real fast. When people realized that people were listening, those two facts developed an incredible amount of trust. We now have six working teams from different parts of the factory that meet once a week on their own, not with any supervisors. We have many, many less supervisors than we have ever had in a factory. They meet. They take minutes. They list grievances. They analyze their process. They analyze their process both productivity-wise and health-wise.
This is all fed back to us. If it is not addressed, we hear about it. We have opened up all kinds of avenues for communication now that would be impossible to shut down.
MS. SATER: You have to have fun with the programs, too. I mean, I made major points because I bought in cookies one day for 1,000 people in the factory. It was a thank you. It was a project they worked on, and I can't even remember what it was right now. But they still come up to me and go, "Gail, that was fun to have all those cookies that day."
I have one -- if you are working around sewing machines, you know this happens. We just put in a whole eyewear policy, that if you walk through this door, you have to wear safety glasses. Well, that was a real chore. I mean, nobody liked it. They complained and everything.
Well, this week -- and I know if you are not working with sewing machines, this is going to sound gross, but a needle broke and went in a lady's nose. They bleed a lot. So they took her to the hospital, make sure it still wasn't there. We got teasing her about it. I said, "Okay. Now because of you I suppose we are going to need nose guard policies."
So we went to the local -- and you know the Groucho Marx glasses with the nose and the -- we bought her one. And she wears it around, and they are just a stitch. It was a serious problem, but we made it a little fun, that no, we are not going to have nose guards.
MR. MEYER: A year after we started this ergonomic program, we worked with the union and we have had now a health awareness day at the factory where the union brought in ten medical people, and they all got reports on their blood pressure. There was a nutritionist there. Their cholesterol was given to them.
Again, we made it fun. There were balloons all over. We made it a whole day event. I don't believe, if we wouldn't have started the ergonomic program originally, people wouldn't have been trusting of this. They were excited about it.
So again, once this little snowball gets started, it is very tough to stop.
MR. FRUMIN: Okay. I would like to thank the panelists for their presentations. Just to sum up very briefly, we have heard certainly about some of the severe problems in the industry with very high workers' comp costs, high rates of injury and disability and lack of information or resources to do anything about it. Then we have seen some incredible success stories which extend far beyond the sort of bread and butter of ergonomics in terms of job design and job analysis and job modification-to things like improved organization of work in general, greater productivity, improved quality, greater trust, better communication, improved supervision, reduced supervision, and flatter management structures.
We have heard about the essential role of worker involvement in all phases of the program, whether it was getting the program off the ground and overcoming stiff management reluctance or it was establishing a line of communication or doing job analysis or coming up with prototypes and new prototypes and more prototypes or doing training at every stage of the game. In this industry certainly, worker involvement is a critical component to the success of any ergonomics program.
Finally, in terms of some of the key job modifications, we have talked about modifying equipment. But that equipment alone is not enough, whether it is seats or machines, modifying entire work stations and then modifying whole systems of work organization. I think the arguments for piece work have about died. Many people have piece work. In some places it still makes sense, but clearly the awareness is growing that piece work is as much a part of the problem in many sectors of the industry as it could be a viable manufacturing technique. We now see job rotation and modular manufacturing as part of an overall change in work organization.
So I am going to try to summarize this at the plenary session this afternoon. I hope I don't get too far afield from what the speakers have said. I want to thank all of you for coming.
We do have some information, again, in the back for those of you who might have come in late. We are going to take some time over the next half-hour, 45 minutes, to show some of the videotapes that people have brought. We have a longer version of the UNITE videotape on the union clinic and the Sequins project. We also have the video from Red Wing.
We won't be doing that immediately, though. You might want to come back later after lunch, because we are trying to set up a brief press briefing at the noon hour.
Any other final comments?
MS. KELLOGG: Yes, just that we have materials available in Chinese and Spanish, which you can take some of or order from our office, along with our other health and safety materials.
MR. FRUMIN: We have a photocopied version of the union manual back there. At the back of that is an order form. So feel free to pick one up.
Thank you very much for coming and enjoy the rest of the conference.
(Whereupon, the Apparel/Textile Session was concluded.)
