NOTE: This document is provided for historical purposes only.
Tolle Graham from EMPLOYEE INVOLVEMENT
MR. ALEXANDER: Tolle Graham is going to report out on the Employee Involvement Session, and she is with Massachusetts Coalition on Occupational Safety and Health.
MS. GRAHAM: First I wanted to thank NIOSH and OSHA for inviting me here to this conference to be able to present on this panel; but my secondary agenda was to be able to get together with those diehards last night for two hours from 5 to 7 while we were starving for dinner to talk about popular education and ergonomics training. And I think that, since there won't be any written evaluation about it, you have to keep hearing about it from us; that it was great and people loved it, and have been coming up to us all day saying "Boy, that was fun, and it was really important."
Employee involvement. First I want to recognize and thank the panelists, our chair and presenter, Lida Orta-Anes, who's from the International United Auto Workers. We had a presenter, Ron Gillespie from Farmlands Foods, and Terry Stentz, who's an ergonomist from University of Nebraska who worked at Farmlands Foods on their ergonomics project; and Mick Andersen from Eaton Corporation; they were our presenters.
A theme of this conference that we've heard again and again is that employee involvement is one of the cornerstones of effective health and safety programs at the worksite. However, employee involvement means different things to different people, so I'd just like to touch on a couple of important issues related to employee involvement that I culled from our presenters, and from audience participation.
One of them is, who participates on ergonomics teams or committees? There seemed to be pretty strong general agreement that where it was most effective is where workers were in equal numbers to management, or even in greater numbers to management.
Lida presented a UAW study where they compared what they called participatory and non-participatory task forces where union members were in equal numbers and another one where it was mostly the technical management people, and one union member, and there were many ways in which they felt that their programs were much more effective with the participatory model.
It was also brought up by someone in our audience that we missed presenting another model that's not uncommon in many workplaces, where unions have taken the lead and actually run some ergonomics programs themselves. An example of that is the United Steelworkers Local actually in Massachusetts that I've been involved with, of local school bus drivers who run ergonomics training on a monthly basis as part of their licensing procedure.
Another issue that was discussed was, how do we give power to these committees in our organizations? Some of the issues related to that was, making sure that there's time off to do the work. Workers need to know that if they're on a committee, they aren't going to be constantly told "Oh, we're too busy now, you can't get time off to go to that committee."
There were issues around respect and communication skills to be able to work well on the committees, and training to bring everybody up to speed and understand all the language that we talk about, the technical stuff.
The committees need to be able to work on a large enough scope to work at the tough issues associated with work organization. Things like production quotas and staffing; it's not just work design and getting new chairs. And then for many unionized workers, in order to be a more effective employee involved in this process, they have their own independent rights to set an ergonomics agenda. Some of the programs that were presented like the UAW, the UAW came in with some of their trainers and they had a real labor-management cooperative program.
Finally, the most challenging moment in our session was during the question and answer period where a question came up regarding labor laws in the area of employee involvement. This relates to the legal frame work for employee involvement, which is Section 882 of the National Labor Relations Act, which defines what company-dominated formations are, in which employees and management interact on issues of wages, hours and working conditions, which includes health and safety.
NIOSH and OSHA need to give greater attention to what this means in regards to really effective employee involvement, where workers will have some independent protections and authorities as they participate in committees or teams to solve ergonomic problems; and as an aside, an ergonomic standard wouldn't be bad, too.
So thank you very much.
MR. ALEXANDER: Tolle, thank you very much.
