NOTE: This document is provided for historical purposes only.
Laura Stock from TRAINING
MR. ALEXANDER: Our next speaker is going to be Laura Stock from the University of California, and she will be reporting now on the training area.
DR. STOCK: Good afternoon. I was moderator of the Training session and I'm going to begin by talking about some general principles that virtually everyone on our panel has agreed with and then go on to some specific points that each panelist made. While there's been a lot of controversy (and many of us have been involved in different sides of that controversy) about ergonomics in general, there has been almost a universal agreement that training is an important element of any comprehensive ergonomics program. But despite that agreement there are differences in people's views about what training should accomplish.
Our panelists contrasted what one panelist called the "traditional" approach with more comprehensive and action-oriented approaches. In the traditional model, the assumption is that workers have a very limited role to play in ergonomic programs, and that training, therefore, is intended merely to just deliver information about the company health and safety policies and encourage compliance with existing health and safety rules.
In contrast, others like those on our panel, recognize that workers have a critical role to play in any comprehensive program; that workers are in fact the experts when it comes to identifying hazards and solutions. This sentiment has been echoed by almost every speaker at this conference. What our panel contributes to this discussion is that training is the tool that can unleash the enormous expertise that workers have.
Such training, must have the goal of empowering workers to be active participants in all elements of the health and safety program. And to achieve this goal you must use a certain training methodology. It involves not only setting action-oriented objectives, but also using participatory training methods that incorporate an understanding of how adults learn.
Adult education is based on the following principles: that trainers must draw on the expertise and experience of the learners; that people learn better by doing, by actively participating rather than through more passive techniques like lectures or reading; that training has to be based on the specific needs of the workers as they define them, and must also take into account their special characteristics like their language, their literacy level and their culture and community.
Also, a general point that everybody made is that training, while necessary, is not sufficient and cannot be the only hazard control strategy. Unfortunately, probably many of us are familiar with instances where people say they have a comprehensive ergonomic program and really all they have is a training program and often just a video-based program. That's not enough. There must also be a commitment to concrete changes, not just in worker behavior but in hazardous working conditions.
The points above were made by almost all of our panelists. The following are some of the additional, specific topics that people covered.
One of our speakers was Paula Coleman of the Carpenters Union; and she discussed a "train the trainer" program which uses participatory methods and has as its goal to train carpenters to play an active role in making changes in their workplace.
One of the interesting elements of her program is that the program is taught by skilled journeymen, most of whom now suffer from CTDs. These trainers know everything about the work and about the job site culture. They've also had time to figure out safer work practices. This is in line with some of the principles of adult education, that members of the target population are often the best educators because they understand most completely what the needs and concerns are.
Ms. Coleman also concurred that training is essential but it's only a tiny first step. She talked some about how the nature of the industry mitigates against carpenters controlling their work environment and in implementing long term changes; and stated that therefore the commitment for training and for change must come from owners and management as well.
Our next speaker was Steve Guttman from 3M. He discussed the need for training at all levels of the organization, training that would be designed specifically for managers, supervisors, engineers, safety and health committees, and hourly employees. Their training program has had some very impressive results. Since they implemented their training programs they've had a 58 percent reduction in the number of lost time ergonomic cases, and a 22 percent reduction in OSHA-recordable cases between 1990 and 1996.
Then Kay Stewart, who's a training consultant, talked about the importance of needs assessment, and the fact that you need to ask what the audience needs to know, where they are coming from, what they want to learn, what they believe the real issues are, and what are some of the barriers they face in getting where they want to go. She gave us some insight into training style and using humor and other kinds of techniques to break the ice.
Our last speaker was Susan Moir, the director of the Construction Occupational Safety and Health Project at University of Massachusetts, Lowell. She provided an introduction to popular education methods, which are methods that originated in Brazil and are now used all over the world. These methods are interactive and learner-centered and well-suited to accessing workers ergonomic expertise.
There was a tremendous amount of interest in these participatory and popular education techniques. In fact at the end of the day, we convened an informal follow-up session at 5 o'clock that evening, where we spent about two hours with over 60 participants discussing different training techniques and sharing people's experiences using them.
And in fact, the interest that we all felt in training and its important role led many of us to believe that the next OSHA/NIOSH joint conference should be on Training, and how to use training effectively in dealing with health and safety problems. So I'd like to publicly ask OSHA and NIOSH to follow up this successful conference with another one, preferably on the West Coast where I'm located, on training.
Thank you very much.
