Last November the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) issued an ergonomics standard to address work-related musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs). Musculoskeletal disorders have ridden in on waves of dramatic changes in the work environment, and along with the influx of women into a wide range of occupations beyond traditional vocational ghettos. MSDS accounted for almost 64 percent of all reported occupational illnesses in the U.S. in 1997.(Musculoskeletal disorders refer to damage to muscles, joints, tendons, or nerves. Carpal Tunnel Syndrome is the most well-known of these conditions. Outcomes may range from slight chronic discomfort to permanent disability.) Here in Rhode Island, Beacon Mutual, the state funded workers compensation insurer, has between three to four thousand MSDs claims on its roles at any one time. The National Academy of Sciences has pegged the costs of workplace musculoskeletal disorders to run somewhere between 13 and 30 billion dollars a year.
OSHA’s interest in MSDs is not new. Back in 1990, then Labor Secretary Elizabeth Dole announced her intention to develop an ergonomic rule and did issue special guidance for the meatpacking industry: “The message in four guidelines is simple: repetitive motion illnesses can be minimized through proper workplace engineering and job design and by effective employee training and education.” Secretary Dole also supported OSHA in the agency’s use of the general duty clause to issue citations and fines.
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At the behest of Congress, the National Academy of Science and the Institute of Medicine released a report just this past January 18, called Musculoskeletal Disorders and the Workplace. The Academy and the IOM jointly reported that, while it is hard to identify specific exposure levels with specific risks in a population there is indeed strong scientific evidence that links worksite exposures to musculoskeletal disorders and that ergonomic measures have been shown to avoid these injuries.
This judgment reaffirms a similar summary issued by the Academy in 1998; it coincides with a draft rule developed by the American National Standard Institute (ANSI); and it agrees intimately with a judgment of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) posted after an exhaustive review of over 600 published peer studies.
Some in Congress are rabid to repeal OSHA’s ergonomics standard. Beyond the desire, it is the method that was ominous. The use of the Congressional Review Act (CRA) to revoke OSHA’s rule.
Passed in 1996 as part of the (then House Republican leader Newt) Gingrich anti-regulatory hysteria CRA permits Congress to declare any new rule proposed by either OSHA or EPA null and void by a joint resolution of Congress.
Though the OSHA ergonomics rule has been picked as the first target, no proposed environmental rule on pesticides, on wetlands, on clean air or on clean water will be safe.
(Celenza is the director of RICOSH and was a member of the Commission to Study
Ergonomics in the General Assembly during the 1999-2000 session.)
