NOTE: This document is provided for historical purposes only.
Presentation by Walter Burlington, Rocco Enterprises
MS. GIBSON: Walter Burlington is a graduate of Villanova University, has 22 years in the human resources management field in textiles and poultry, 2 very ergonomically-challenged fields. That was as tactful as I could get. He is currently Human Resource Manager for Rocco Quality Foods, a poultry processor in St. Pauls, North Carolina
MR. BURLINGTON: Thank you.
I appreciate Angie and the North Carolina Department of Labor for giving me the opportunity to come and tell you our story.
Before we get into that, I want to tell you a little bit about Rocco Enterprises. Rocco is located in Harrisonburg, Virginia, in the beautiful Shenandoah Valley. It is a food processing company whose primary products are chickens and turkeys, poultry. There are four processing plants and a distribution center, and we have about 3,800 people.
The St. Pauls, North Carolina operation where I am located began processing turkeys in January of 1990; however, before we even began processing turkeys, we were learning about what this word "ergonomics" means. In the late 1989 and early 1990s, North Carolina was sort of a hot bed of ergonomics, basically because of the citations that Perdue had received and about two years of negotiations there.
So we decided as a company, not only in North Carolina but in our other locations, that we were going to take a proactive approach to ergonomics rather than sit back and wait for our friends at the Department of Labor to come in and cite us.
We began meeting with a gentleman by the name of Mohammed Ayub, Dr. Ayub, who is a noted ergonomist and professor of industrial engineering at North Carolina State University. We met with him so that we could conduct job analysis and develop an ergonomic program at our plant from the very day we began.
The program that we developed was called Feeling Good. There was a slide presentation that we presented not only to supervisors but to every employee in the work force. We started an ergonomic action team. We started a work hardening program. We started a restricted duty program. We implemented an exercise program and a plant-wide job rotation program over a period of a year, year and a half. It wasn't all at once, it was implemented gradually.
We were fortunate, as I said, that we were able to implement this full scale ergonomic program from the ground up in a brand new plant with a work force that didn't really know a lot about poultry. This, we feel, was a tremendous advantage. We didn't have to go through changing things that had been ongoing for 20 or 30 years. We started from the ground up.
So I think you can tell that Rocco was committed to ergonomics, implementing it at St. Pauls as well as at the other facilities, the other plants. Dr. Ayub was a very big influence in the development of our program and its continued success. I mention Dr. Ayub because he was the founding director of the North Carolina Ergonomics Resource Center.
In October of 1994, Rocco became the first charter member of the Center. We felt then, as we do today, that we would greatly benefit from being a part of this "partnership" with OSHA, with North Carolina State University, and with other businesses and industries in North Carolina.
North Carolina OSHA reached out and said how can we help improve the safety, the productivity and the well being of the workers in North Carolina rather than using the traditional punitive, adversarial role. Well, OSHA got together with the North Carolina State University and began the Ergonomics Center to support industry in their pursuit for humanizing the workplace.
Their goal was simply to emphasize applied research from the university, identify, analyze and correct ergonomic deficiencies, and to act as a bridge between that technology that we get from the universities and education and an information exchange between the university, OSHA and industry. Again, a true partnership.
Now, this really sounds good, doesn't it? But really what does it mean to us? What does it mean to industry in North Carolina? It means, number one, that we have a resource for training, where several courses are offered at the Center or at the plant. I received a brochure about two weeks ago on 1997 ergonomic training programs at the Center. Courses such as advanced ergonomics for manufacturing, ergonomic team leader training, managing employees with musculoskeletal disorders. That's just the tip of the iceberg of the kind of resources, the kind of training that these folks have put together for us.
It is also a place where we can go look at new product information. And as you mentioned, they have the laboratory where they have tools, the vendor room, which is a tremendous opportunity to go in and play. We bring people up there from our line and we say, "Try these scissors out, try these knives out," and you don't have the pressure of sales people.
Consultative assistance ranges from having one of their ergonomists come in and do a full ergonomic assessment to maybe just talking about specific risk factors and problems. It is not related to OSHA enforcement or even OSHA consultative. The folks go back to the Center. They don't go and tell OSHA enforcement, "Oh, they've got all kinds of problems." They help us get those problems resolved, so that if OSHA comes in we are ahead of the game.
So, again, what does this all mean to us? I have a slide that is going to really tell the story to you. It is not a fancy slide. I didn't have a lot of time to work on it, but it is pretty simple.
If you look at 1990 when we started our operations, there was about $115,000 only on CTD costs. We had a lot of other problems, too, but on CTD it was $115,000. If you take a look at the trend down in 1996, we are talking about $15,000. We had a blip in '93. We did a lot of "tell us your pain, tell us your problems" kind of thing. We didn't run from it. We gave surveys. We did symptom surveys. We said, "Tell us what's wrong." So we had a little bit of a blip. But I think if you look at the overall trend, what can you say, it's fantastic.
When we talk about saving money, we saved a lot of money by being proactive, by getting the help of the Ergo Center and moving on with the program rather than hiding and saying, "We don't have a problem."
So we attribute our success to our ergonomic foundations that were laid back in 1990 and '91, and our continued emphasis on the fundamentals, the exercises, the rotations. I am going to tell you standing right here, Friday when I go back to work, I'm going to review Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday's rotations, my nurse and I. We review them weekly to make sure they meet the standards of the program. You hear a lot of overall, but I am telling you some meat and potatoes, rotations, exercises, breaks, the kinds of things that help people minimize repetitive motion injuries.
Finally, our continued partnership with the North Carolina Ergonomics Resources Center is also a big help in where we are today.
I want to thank you for allowing me to share with you our success.
