NOTE: This document is provided for historical purposes only.
Dan Cimmino from MARITIME
DR. MARRAS: Next we'll hear from Dan Cimmino from Maritime
MR. CIMMINO: Thank you.
I would first like to take the opportunity to thank NIOSH and OSHA for the invitation to come and speak here, and I'd also like to congratulate them on what's so far been an outstanding program, and I personally hope to see more of them in the future.
I would also like to thank my cochair, Chico McGill, from the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, Local 733, at Ingle Shipbuilding; and Karl Siegfried, corporate ergonomist at Bath Iron Workers in Bath, Maine. Both gave outstanding and informative presentations which are evident by the number of questions and comments following their presentations.
All of our presentations focused on implementing ergonomics in the maritime industry. The maritime industry is a different industry, very difficult to implement ergonomics in that it's not an assembly line environment. Probably like a lot of others, similar to the aircraft industry.
Ergonomics is difficult enough to implement in any environment, but the shipbuilding industry presents many additional challenges. Many times the products that you're building were designed decades ago. Production cycles are measured in months and years rather than seconds and minutes.
If you want to capture on videotape what an employee does in some industries, maybe you could use four minutes of videotape and get several complete cycles. If you wanted to capture on videotape what a ship builder does, you better bring a lot of tape and follow him around for a few days because there's a lot of different things that they do.
Because the designs are so old, there's very limited opportunity for process changes because, as you know, the design of a product many times dictates much of the manufacturing process, so there's not a lot you can do, as far as changing the process, but there are a lot of very effective things that you could do to control the problems.
Two things kept on coming up over and over. One of them was education and one of them is employee involvement, and I'll touch briefly on both of those.
Education is absolutely critical for all the organization and different members of the organization should receive education at different levels. Management education was critical, and there's several reasons for that.
When you need job modifications, more than likely you'll need management approval to make the changes, and if they speak the same language, if they know what you're talking about, they're much more receptive to the changes.
Also, when you look at ergonomic injuries a lot of times management doesn't understand what the problem is. They're not all ergonomists. They're not all safety professionals, they're manufacturing professionals. Unless they see somebody bleeding or part of their body missing, a lot of times they don't understand that a person is hurt, but understanding the philosophy behind a cumulative trauma disorder or what causes a cumulative trauma disorder, very important in helping him understand what causes it and what's their part in preventing them from occurring.
The other thing that kept coming up was employee involvement, and that's absolutely critical. It's more than employee involvement in that you involve them and inform them what's going on. You make them part of the actual process. We have what's called health and safety task teams, where we have hourly level employees as part of the process.
It's pretty significant when they understand that they're part of the process.
I teach a lot of training classes and I'll give before and after examples, just generic examples of ergonomic fixes, and then I'll ask them to bring up some examples of a similar problem in their area, and most of the time someone will raise their hand and say, oh, there's no way that you'll be able to fix that problem. I have a simple answer to that. You're right. I'm not going to fix it, you're going to fix it, because you're here for a reason; you're here because we need your help, and if we didn't need your help we wouldn't be sitting in this room.
At that time they understand that they own part of the problem. They're less likely to complain, more likely to suggest good ideas. More times than not, that very same individual will come up with an outstanding idea to fix a problem.
The other thing, and one of the comments made, had to do with empowerment. Without employee empowerment, employee involvement is kind of useless. If you really want to dishearten people and take the wind out of a group of people, assign them to a team to study a problem, let them take a look at it and then ignore their results and suggestions. If you really want to demoralize a group of people, I suggest you do that.
However, if you really want to empower them and get them rolling implementing their suggestions is really a good way to get them rolling, and when you seem some success going, that will breed more success.
As Chico McGill pointed out in his presentations, a lot of other industries have explored the benefits of ergonomics in joint labor management programs, but the shipbuilding industry is kind of late to catch on to that, but that's starting to change, and it's evident to ergonomic programs underway through the national shipbuilding research program, and taking advantage of programs like that and continuing to work together, labor and management, is a way to, as I said before, breed more success and really benefit everybody.
Karl Ziegfried outlined his program. He gave a lot of good practical examples of interventions in the shipbuilding industry. I had the privilege of visiting Karl at Bath and seeing firsthand his interventions and I can attest that they are both common and very, very effective.
Changes are very widespread. His program uses a team concept where he has an ergonomic core team which will identify problem areas, and the first order of business when he reaches the problem areas is education of both the hourly and salaried employees in that area.
They then brainstorm solutions.
They'll make prototype workstations to try to eliminate the ergonomic risk.
As soon as they fine-tuned it, it's then implemented throughout the department, and it has been a very effective process for them.
As I said before, Newport News Shipbuilding is very focused on education, through a lot of different avenues, through classes and health and safety task team, through night school, voluntary night school for employees, through take-home courses in health and safety and through newsletters.
In our clinic, when somebody comes in with a back injury, they don't leave the clinic until they've seen a video on back injury prevention.
The same goes for the wrist, the same goes for the shoulder. It's reactive, but it is effective.
We have a lot of health and safety task teams; over 40 health and safety task teams, all educated in ergonomics, as well as in industrial hygiene, lockout/tagout, all different subjects.
The workplace modifications are focused on fixing the problems after finding them. We have what I'd like to call low-tech ergonomics, as far as job analysis.
In my opinion, job analysis has four goals, and if you accomplish those our goals, you're analysis is in-depth enough, and what you want to do is define the problem; highlight the area where the problem is; justify a workplace modification; and be able to prioritize it.
If you can accomplish those goals, it's sophisticated enough an evaluation. The changes usually made are very simple but very effective.
In conclusion, when properly applied through education, teamwork, and empowerment, ergonomics can very significantly reduce injuries and illnesses while increasing productivity and product quality.
Thank you.
DR. MARRAS: Thank you, Dan.
