NOTE: This document is provided for historical purposes only.
Laurie Kellogg, UNITE
MS. HIRSHBERG: Our next speaker is Laurie Kellogg, and she has been working in the labor movement for 15 years, concentrating on organizing and on developing educational programs for Spanish-speaking workers on health and safety issues.
During her six years at UNITE, she has coordinated a union-based Occupational Health Clinic and started a support group for members with repetitive strain injuries. Over 1,000 union members have been seen at the clinic.
She has worked extensively on establishing joint labor-management health and safety committees and works closely with small apparel factories to implement joint ergonomic programs.
Laurie.
MS. KELLOGG: Thanks very much.
Eric, while I begin, put on the overhead about RSI rates in apparel.
I want to give a couple of minutes of background before we show a brief video clip about the industry as we see it in New York City, which is different than some of the rest of the country. Some of these points do not apply to the specific factory I am going to talk about, but it gives you an important context.
The Department of Labor estimates that there are about 6,000 to 7,000 small garment contracting shops in New York City. The average size is 40 workers, primarily older women, primarily non-English speaking, many immigrant workers. Some are not literate in any language. And an increasing number speak remote dialects, particularly in the Asian population.
These workers are extremely economically vulnerable. They are working piece rate. When asked to, they are working very long days because of the seasonal nature of our industry, and they are not taking breaks. Then they are unemployed for long periods of time as well.
These are not workers who are taking time off to go to the doctor. They may be afraid of the outcome and prefer to deny the symptoms they are feeling. There are language barriers. There is massive mis-diagnosis by the medical community, although that is improving year by year. And they may be afraid of employer retaliation. They are postponing their medical care, particularly when they think it is arthritis; they think they are getting "old age" disease at age 35.
Many of them have heard that the workers' compensation system is a cesspool in New York. I'm sorry to say that is the reputation. Again, we are seeing some improvements there, recently.
So a number of the surgeons who are working on carpel tunnel and RSIs in New York have told us that when they see apparel workers, they are seeing the worst, most advanced cases of repetitive strain injuries.
Now, on the employer side, the contracting shops, of those 6,000 or 7,000 shops, an increasing number are illegal and sweatshops. Of those, 1,500 are going out of business every year. And new ones are opening up. A lot of these employers, these small contractors, are being squeezed by the larger manufacturers that are giving them work. Some of these contractors themselves don't speak English and are not that familiar with their obligations (under the law).
And the contracting shops are extremely vulnerable economically as well, so they are putting pressure on the workers. All of this context is basically to say that ergonomics is not yet a household word in many of these shops and that every aspect of the project that I am going to talk about posed enormous challenges, and that employers like Sequins and managers like Peter Meyer, who is going to speak, are very unusual.
So if our video guy is here, I would like to show a five-minute clip of our video.
A videotape which discusses joint labor-management ergonomics project at Sequins Int'l was shown. (The project was funded by matching grant to employer. Ergonomic chairs were purchased and harmful machines were rebuilt to be fully adjustable. The video is available for $10.00 from UNITE.)
MS. KELLOGG: Thank you.
That gives you a little taste of what this project was about. And I would like to just touch on a couple of highlights of it. Just by way of background again, our experience indicates that many workers are not reporting these injuries and illnesses and that the problem is much more extensive. That's part of why we established the CAF fund, to help employers deal with these problem.
I want to mention again that without the union having established an occupation health clinic, we would not have such good information about what is going on with our workers. We are greatly indebted to Mount Sinai Hospital for partnering with us to set up this clinic. The clinic has seen about 1,000 workers. And having our own occupational health clinic at the union allows for accurate diagnosis, much better referrals for treatment, referrals to the member assistance program to help workers with psycho-social issues and benefits issues. And it has allowed us to get a handle on what is going on with these injuries in our industry in New York, as well as how our members are faring with the workers' comp system. And most importantly, it allows us to prioritize what shops we need to go into to start making health and safety improvements.
The CAF fund, as is mentioned, is a partnership with the industry set up during national negotiations, and matching grants are provided to employers. Any employer can apply. And in the case of the Sequins project, they received approximately $8,500 in matching monies.
There were approximately 80 spoolers and 20 sewing machine operators involved in this project. And as you can see with this overhead the demographic characteristics, we had to deal with the language issues, et cetera.
The key element of this program from our point of view was the educational process for starters. I started with a confidential symptoms questionnaire for workers, but what I want to emphasize is that the entire process involved talking to workers and then supervisors as well about how they saw the problems on the job, recording their ideas, and asking them to come up with solutions.
So the ownership of the project in the sense of input, the sense of participation and cooperation, was based on this key fact, that they are the ones who identified many of the problems and came up with the new machine design.
We started with getting the BIOFIT adjustable chairs and doing a training program. And from there went to a prototype spooler, which the workers on the committee gave many, many criticisms to. And from there, we built more and more prototypes until we got it right.
And Peter is going to talk about the resistance from upper management to this project, but I will just say from the union's point of view that it was vociferous and articulate and enthusiastic resistance on the part of upper management. And it was quite to his credit that he was able to get this project through.
The supervisors were a key part of this. They also felt a lot of ownership over the project. On their part, the greatest resistance that they had was that they saw there was a problem, they understood that there was pain, and their attitude was, "pain is part of life". Pain is not a disease. It is not something we have to really worry about. "Come on, girls, you know, grow up. Deal with it." And we really had to work on this issue of disease, disability, and helping people understand the diseases are real.
Then from the feedback and improving the prototypes, the final change was that Sequins decided for other reasons as well, to go to modular production. The modular added a number of additional improvements, particularly the option to sit and stand while doing the work and the fact that workers now were not spooling eight hours a day. They were doing other jobs. There was job rotation. There was walking. Different muscle groups were used. A great decrease in repetition and in awkward postures and an increase in the amount of control that workers had over the pace of work and greatly improved relations with management as a result of the change over to modular.
And Peter will touch on that as well. So the task enlargement was a key part of this.
After Peter gives his presentation, I would like to talk a little bit more about the Mount Sinai outcome for one minute.
Eric, can you just put on the overhead?
The Mount Sinai study was a key part of this, and that involved questionnaires regarding symptoms, severity of pain, histories, non-occupational ergonomic exposures, and many, many other issues. It is about a 12-page questionnaire. And one of the people involved in that study is here with us, Jonathan Dropkin.
Jonathan has brought copies of three different studies that Mount Sinai has done, one regarding this project and two others with workers from our industry in New York City. And I encourage you to pick up that information from him or in the back.
So I am going to turn it over to Peter, and then I will conclude with the last two overheads.
