NOTE: This document is provided for historical purposes only.
Scott Schneider from CONSTRUCTION
DR. MARRAS: So let's start with Scott Schneider. Scott.
MR. SCHNEIDER: Thanks, Bill.
We had a workshop on Construction this morning, and we had five speakers, so I guess I get one-minute on each.
We started off with a presentation by Stew Burkhammer who is with Bechtel, and he discussed the back injury and prevention program, which really has about four components.
One of them is training of workers about how to lift properly, and they also have a stretching program, and they get retrained quarterly. They also do stretching every morning on the job for five minutes. Everybody does it.
They also allow them to do it at lunch time on a voluntary basis. They do provide back belts for workers to use and train them on how to use it.
They also do a lot of pre-planning of jobs and analysis of the jobs before they do the work to see how they could make the jobs easier.
As a result of this program over the last couple of years, lost workday injury rates have significantly dropped. We did have a lot of discussion of the back belt issue, and Stew said that he felt that back belts are only a small piece of the puzzle, that really you need all of these components to make it work properly.
Then we had a presentation by Tony Barsotti, who is with Technology and Development Corporation, which is a contracting company in the Pacific Northwest that builds computer chip manufacturing facilities. They developed a soft tissue injury prevention program, which includes training of workers, initial training.
They do a stretching program every morning on the job.
They do a lot of incident investigations of accidents that occur on the job.
They also have an intervention program where they've been working with an ergonomist on the site, one or two days a week to look at particular hazardous tasks, try to figure out ways to intervene. They've been looking at plumbers and electricians and also drywall handling.
They also did an evaluation of their program and, in particular, of the stretching program; did a survey to see what people thought of it, whether they felt better at the end of the day, et cetera.
Third: Then we began a panel of people to talk about specific trades. We had Bill Buckley from the Roofers Local in Minneapolis, who gave us sort of a quick snapshot, a history, of the roofing trade and what's happened over the last hundred years, where there's been an incredible increase and mechanization of the work, where now they're using power cutters, and many years ago they used to use axes.
There's been a lot of changes in the material handling on the job, use of motorized carts, use of boom trucks, et cetera, to move equipment around, which has resulted in a dramatic reduction in the amount of injuries on the job, although that still is a big problem that needs to be worked on.
Secondly, we had Paddy Dennehy who is with the Carpenters Ergonomics Training Program in Washington, D.C. They started a training program a couple years ago to train all their members on ergonomics. They've trained about 5,000 people so far in a four-hour program.
They're also doing some ergonomic intervention studies, looking at form work and drywall work from the Pacific Northwest. They talked about his experiences with some of the interventions that they've tried, about how some of them have been pretty helpful, but other ones were sort of touted and really didn't pan out the way they thought they would, or weren't as useful as they originally thought they might be.
Our last speaker was Tom Cook with the University of Iowa, who's been working with an operating engineer's contractor in Iowa. They have done a symptom survey of a couple hundred -- about 400 operating engineers in Iowa and tried to use the results to pinpoint where the areas are that operating engineers have the most problems.
Where they're particularly high were in the neck and also foot and ankle problems, although they also have low back problems like most construction workers.
But they've been working closely with one contractor in Iowa who buys a lot of equipment. What he does is when he buys a piece of equipment he'll spend $30,000 retrofitting it to make it easier to work on and the guys love it.
They add grab bars and nonskid surfaces to make it easier to get in and out of.
They prevent slips.
He adds joysticks and has a replacement program to make it easier to use.
He has a window replacement program to make it easier to see. If there's any cracks or damage to the windows, they're replaced immediately.
Also, he's done a lot of changes to retrofit the equipment to make it easier to service, to get it easier to find the lubrication points.
The results have been increased productivity, increased employee satisfaction and a decrease in lost work time injuries.
Let me just conclude by mentioning we did have some discussion at the end, and one of the major topics was someone suggested that they find an increase in the number of injuries just before a layoff or just when a job is about to end.
In the discussions what came up was that may be related to a couple of things.
One of them is in the symptom survey they did in Iowa they found that 40 percent of the people complained that one of their major problems was having to work while they were hurt.
And so I think a lot of people are actually working while they're hurt because they need the paycheck and then not reporting the injuries until it's imminent that they're going to be laid off, perhaps.
And then, secondly, there may be an increase in productivity. As people are pushing to get the job done on time, that increase in productivity may also be related to a rise in reported injuries toward the end of the job.
That's all I had to say. Thanks.
