NOTE: This document is provided for historical purposes only.
QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS
MR. LeGRANDE: We have several minutes for questions. If we have any, if you could please go to the mike and ask the specific question of the specific or more than one panelist.
Q: I'm Nick Warren from the Ergonomic Technology Center in Connecticut. I'm intrigued, actually through the entire set of presentations yesterday and today about the issue of psychosocial and organizational exposures. I brought up this question once in the Manufacturing 1, didn't seem to have that much relevance, and I'm wanting to expand it a little bit to the people who were talking today.
In general what seems to happen is that we're focusing, at least explicitly, in most of the work that most of the manufacturers and organizations have done on biomechanical exposures and on the reduction of biomechanical exposures.
It occurs to me that what's implicitly happened in the types of interventions that you're talking about are really significant and major psychosocial in the workplace, particularly around the issues of autonomy and social support; and the process that all of you are reporting is helpful, which is the establishment of ergonomics committees which have their own input involving workers. One individual talked yesterday, Dan Cimmino, I believe, about being clear that you not only involve workers but empower workers.
So that the changes that are happening, a lot of the reductions, which we've seen major and very impressive reductions in all of your programs that are reported here, certainly can be attributed in part to the changes in the engineering issues in the company. But I'm also interested in how the changes in the organizational climate, structure, culture that are also occurring, we haven't really dealt with them or talked about them here in an explicit way; and I'm wondering if your committees, the specific question that comes from this to me: Do your committees in any way explicitly deal with issues of changing work organization within your plants? Which is actually happening. There are changes in worker involvement and worker autonomy. It would appear to be changes, in some cases anyway, in levels of skill. The social support networks both coworkers and supervisors and management, which also appear to be changing.
So I'm wondering if any of you could address whether these issues come up explicitly in your ergonomics committees, or if they just kind of happen without anybody thinking about them?
MR. LeGRANDE: As the chair, I can offer a few comments. A major element in the ergonomics program of the Communication Workers of America is the component of work organization. Indeed, there have been a number of studies, two of which conducted by NIOSH, major studies involving not only US West, but also the L.A. Times would show the significant associations between musculoskeletal disorders and work organization of psychosocial factors.
A number of other studies conducted in the U.S. and other parts of the world, particularly Europe, have shown much more dramatic results than the NIOSH studies have shown, that is regarding the relationship or association depending on the study between work-related musculoskeletal disorders and work organization factors.
Indeed, I think most ergonomists, all the practitioners in general, take the viewpoint that the initial point of action is to deal with the physical ergonomic factors and then move into the area of work organization.
From a practical viewpoint, I don't represent a company and actually never have; but from a corporate viewpoint relating to the companies that our union does represent, like US West, they will look initially, as most companies would, at physical ergonomic factors, and then as they continue to see problems identified, health problems identified, they will begin to look at the work organization factors.
But it's somewhat a matter of practicality; where do you start first? I'm not suggesting that you should not include work organization among those components, but definitely that you should.
MR. JANOWITZ: Yes, taking off from that, you know everybody talks about management commitment as a prerequisite for a successful ergonomics program. To me, management commitment includes the commitment to look at organizational issues; to have an ergonomics process that really does empower workers and doesn't just give them responsibility to use good body mechanics, let's say, but actually empowers them to make suggestions and test prototypes and make choices about the tools they'll use or the arrangement of their work area whenever possible.
Therefore, I like to use focus groups of workers in which the whole range of issues, both physical and psychosocial issues, are brought up. If the psychosocial issues are severely negative, as happened in the case of one utility that was not represented on this panel, we have to deal with those first. In fact, there were some great tools that some workers had in mind that I thought were very good innovations, but management refused to purchase any of them because they were worried the workers would just steal the tools. Well, that right there is a red flag saying Wait a second. Let's talk about this and see if we can come up with a way that management will be satisfied that these tools will be secure and the workers are willing to help figure out a way to make this work, then we can proceed. If not, forget researching or testing any tools; we need to deal with these organizational issues first. There was a lot of mistrust and anger expressed in the focus groups at that utility, so I didn't proceed looking at the physical issues until six months later when I was somewhat satisfied that we had addressed these organizational issues.
Q: I'm Prema Menon from the University of Hawaii. My question is going back to the gentleman's question about psychosocial. I had attended an earlier discussion in the work evaluation, program evaluation, where Mr. William Holt mentioned how the culture is changing from dependent to independent, and independent going back to interdependence, and how in that interdependent mode, it works out the best in terms of reducing the injuries.
So if that is the best, then can we also include the human factor about status, alertness, because accidents and the state of mind -- does that come into the picture of ergonomics at all?
MR. ALBIN: I think that we tend to look at ergonomics and say that that's MSD-driven only. But I think if we looked again a little broader, we'd see that a lot of what we refer to generally is accidents or injuries also have an ergonomic basis. The design of a knife handle, for example, may not be particularly good so people tend to slip and cut themselves with it. So I think in that way, ergonomics does have more, again to offer than just dealing with MSDs.
MR. JANOWITZ: Of course, your question raises the issue of shift work in general; the length of a shift, the patterns of work, working four 10-hour shifts --
Q: Mental fatigue.
MR. JANOWITZ: -- and then three days off, et cetera. And those are all important in utility work and in the health care industry, et cetera. That's been studied and there's a fair amount of literature on shift work and the effects of fatigue, and those should be taken into consideration. I think Three Mile Island and Chernobyl are examples of that.
Q: And I'm from Bhopal.
MR. LeGRANDE: Any additional questions from the floor? If so, please ask.
Hearing no question and not able to see anyone at a mike, I'd like to thank the panel and suggest we give them a round of appreciation.
