NOTE: This document is provided for historical purposes only.
Jim McCauley from MANUFACTURING 2
DR. MARRAS: Next we're going to hear from Jim McCauley.
MR. McCAULEY: Thank you.
This afternoon we had three presenters, including myself. The first was Jo Spiceland. She is a young lady that has five years experience now in the furniture manufacturing business, wearing several different hats, a company of just a couple hundred people.
Then we went to Dr. Rab Cross, who is a medical doctor, who has gone back and been certified as an ergonomist and is now consulting in the New England States. He gave a good presentation on some of the people he's consulted with and some of the things that they've done to remedy ergonomic problems.
Then I'm with Perdue Farms, that chicken company that disassembles the chickens that you heard about this morning. I talked about our friends from North Carolina that came into our place and gave us some citations and what we went through then to get into a written, defined ergonomic program.
I'm not going to go through all of that. I'm just going to hit some bullets that was kind of the theme of what was being said this afternoon. One of the main themes that came out of it was that ergonomics, CTS, lower musculoskeletal strains, et cetera, is an ongoing problem, and we have to recognize that with our without a standard.
We need to address it, and it's nothing to go hide your head in the sand and pretend like it doesn't exist, only because Washington hasn't come through with something.
If it's good for the people, then it's good, and we should be doing it.
Another thing that we discussed was that at some point every state has a different definition as to what's recordable, whether it's CTS as an illness, an injury; whether it's compensable, et cetera, and whether it was a preexisting condition, and the arguments can go on and on.
The consensus is that there's no need for this extracurricular discussion as to whether it's compensible, recordable, whatever it is. By law, it is compensible in most states. Even in those states that we do business in that it is not compensable, it is recordable. We still handle it as a compensable injury and we pay it ourselves, just like under a state plan.
We don't spend a lot of time arguing about compensability. I think that was the gist of the conversations today of discussing whether it is or isn't. You're just wasting time.
One of the other things that came out was the fact that one program -- and I use the word program -- does not fit all. I don't see, and I think that was the gist of what was being said, that you can have an ergo standard that prescribes what you do in every given situation because it can't be that long or we'd never get a chance to read it. It's got to be performance oriented and it's got to be something that has a little bit of flexibility to it.
In my discussion, I discussed how the State of North Carolina allowed us that flexibility in applying the ergo agreement that we had with them. I also was able to show the great success, and I mean great success, that we have had, because we were able to tailor it to our particular needs.
Medical intervention. To not have early, and I used the word, "early," medical intervention is foolish, to put it politely. We have found, and I think from the other panelists, if you get the people in there early and can have conservative treatment for them it will save a lot of lost time, a lot of surgeries, a lot of permanent or partial disabilities on behalf of your associates or employees later.
Risk analysis. I think that everybody that talked today actually went and looked at their jobs, assessed their jobs, so that they could tell whether they were high-risk jobs or not so high-risk.
We talked about other things, such as job rotation, such as ramp-in, job conditioning, if you might; how that works in some industries and, in particular, how it works in my industry.
It's going to have to be an ongoing process. It's not going to be a program. We all know that a program has a beginning and it has an ending, and in most industries, I can speak for mine, that the art of manufacturing changes from year to year, so whatever you're doing this year may not be apropos or applicable next year, so you're going to have to have something that's ongoing all the time so that you can protect your associates out there in your plants or offices.
I think that was pretty well illustrated today, too, that this was not just a plant manufacturing type of problem. It is also an office type problem, too, where repetitive motion is engaged in.
The last thing that we discussed was that it's not going to be one of these things that you add water to it and you have instant success. Look to some of the things that are being shown here just now and also today, and you can normally expect that it's going to take you 12 to 24 months to really see good, long-lasting, progressive improvement type of changes in your environment.
Some less because you might be smaller; some more because it's going to take a while to incorporate it throughout your whole operation.
One of themes was that you can bite off more than you can chew, so you're better off taking little bites at a time, make sure it works, and then go on to the next appetizer and work on it.
I think, basically, that was the thrust of our presentations.
DR. MARRAS: Thank you.
