 Ergonomics is the science of designing the workplace and work organization to fit the worker or the employee rather than having the worker's body be fitted into the job at hand. Bureau of Labor Statistics have identified over 615,000 lost work day injuries every year due to musculoskeletal disorders. These are the soft tissue injuries, the upper extremity injuries, and especially the lower back injuries. They can be very debilitating, they're very serious, they're very costly, but most important they're preventable. And an ergonomic program does not need to cost a lot of money, I mean a lot of it is common sense, so we need to make sure that we do implement preventive programs designed through ergonomic techniques. When I look at key success factors for an ergonomics program, I believe one of the first things you have to have is the support of top management. Top management doesn't have to do a lot, they just have to be there to support it and encourage it and let the people know they believe in it as well. The group that really has to be there to make it work is the group that's running the plant, that's designing the product, it's all those people, so it's the people on the assembly line floor or the machine floor, it's the mechanical engineers in the manufacturing operations, it's the design engineers, it's all of the people that really put that product, that plant, that whole system together. To get the benefits of good ergonomics, the employees have to be involved in it, when they're involved in it, things really happen and you see motivated, excited employees. The union negotiated the ergonomic committee in the master contract in 1990 and the reason we took it to the table was that our members were getting hurt on the job and there was no violence, no accidents, but over a period of time they were working and wound up hurt, losing a lot of time and money and once you get carpal tunnel and some of your other CTDs, there's no cure, so your life is changed or ruined forever, so we wanted to prevent that. About four or five years ago I started becoming aware of the employees' complaints as to wrist problems, shoulder problems, back problems and since we didn't have a procedure in place for ergonomics at the time, I started to keep my own logs of what the employee was doing, the type of work they were doing and the type of complaints. The safety committee decided to look into the problem and found that there were consultant firms out there that would come in and train them so that they could properly look at the jobs and know how to evaluate and how to rectify the problems. At Melrose Park we focus on a series of goals. We also follow a number of measures of safety and of productivity. Ergonomics is one of the areas we track as well as the overall health and safety. What we saw in 1996, for example, is we had no repetitive trauma OSHA reportable incidences. That's a substantial improvement over past years, but it's only come through an aggressive program coordinated through our committee. We've been able to reduce our workers' compensation costs so that there are only one-fifth of the state average. At the same time, the lost time case rate and the incidence and frequency rate is much lower than national average. This shows that we can reduce our cost and also protect the health and productivity of the workforce. Some of the first things you're going to do is you're going to look at their OSHA 200 logs where there are injuries and illness records and try to determine which ones of those are actually ergonomically related. Then you're going to talk to management officials to find out what kind of programs they have. And then you want to get out into the plant, do some videotaping, look at the tools that they're using, and talk to the employees and ask them, you know, do you report these things to the company officials such as the tingling in your fingers, the numbness in your hands, your arms, those types of things. And find out if they've been trained regarding ergonomics. Do they have a medical department? What kind of medical facilities do they have? When an employee feels pain or discomfort in the workplace, they are encouraged to report this to their supervisor. And supervisors have been given ergonomic training to assist them in responding to these employees. The ergonomics program allows the supervisor to adjust the workstation correct work methods. And if the employee's problems are not resolved with those measures, then they are referred to the nurse for evaluation and treatment. Do you feel anything there? Mm-hmm. Okay, that's good. Okay. I want you to go ahead if you would please and squeeze this for me. Just squeeze it as hard as you can. Okay, that's good. The changes that may have occurred in the workplace are probably going to be less than you are imagining. The old chair was just a straight chair, you know, and it didn't move unless you got up and turned it. So that made it, you know, more difficult. And then you couldn't adjust the back. You couldn't adjust, you know, the height. And some of them you could, but it took two or three people. So with the new chairs, like I said, it's a whole lot better. You know, you can just smash a little thing and it goes up and down. And that's a whole lot better. We also have bundle trucks. You don't have to pick up the whole bundle. You just, you know, you're able to pick up one garment at a time. And that way you don't have to, you know, have to pick up the whole thing, you know, at one time. And that makes a whole lot easier and challenge. And you can also just push the truck up from one, you know, operation to the next. Another thing we have are folding tables that you can adjust them up and down because, you know, we're all not the same height. So with, you know, when you're folding, you get able to lift the table up for taller people and down, you know, low for shorter people. In the last six years, we've experienced over a 50% decrease in the number of illnesses that we had reported before then. We are averaging about a little over two illnesses for every 200,000 I was worked to kind of give you an idea of as far as the frequency is concerned. Dollars, we started our parallel to rates. We noticed as we, as our rates went down for the illnesses concerned, our dollars did also. Plus, our people are happier in doing surveys within the plants myself. I find that they are, they tell me that they are less tired now than they were years ago when they first came to work. It's your smart business to go ahead and get involved with the Ergo program because sooner or later, you'll have problems. In the beginning, most of the people that we'd come in contact with in our small town, you know, when it had to do with the government agency or any kind of an inspection, everything we had heard was that you, you know, these were people to avoid and you didn't want to have anything to do with them. And one time, we did have a surprise inspection and, and in that process where, you know, there were a few things that they pointed out that were wrong and there was really a lot more to be gained by asking their opinion and saying, what should, what should we do here? How should we construct this finish room so that it'll reduce our premiums or be safer in the case of asking OSHA? We think that we actually benefited and because of this, we kind of made this shift from them being the enemy to them being a resource that, that actually would help us. David Carroll, our safety director, he has got books from OSHA and different places and, and he shares them with the safety team and then we carry this on back to our teams. We have had an improvement in ergonomics. It helps lifting on the panel processing. We used to lift just one single panel at a time of plywood. Now we use forklift where we pick it up and we have a lift that works it up onto the table. We don't have to squat, pick up as much. All the people in the plant, all the workers I've talked to have really appreciated that ergonomic innovations and it's helped them work wise and health wise. Our initial analysis of our need for ergonomics or to incorporate ergonomics had to do an awful lot with just reviewing the work centers. We have forums that we use for our work centers and those forms can be filled out. How many times you have to reach? How many times you have to lift or how much do you have to lift? Does this work center require bending? Does it require reaching? And some of those activities can be reduced when you really document all that has to be done for each work center to complete the job or the production job at hand. Oftentimes budget constraints are an issue in any company and it certainly is in hours and so the things that we could fix very easily or very quickly or perhaps the person could could fix it themselves. We gave them the time to do that and the resources and typically didn't cost very much initially for some of the smaller improvements. We've put in place some fairly inexpensive lift. Tables and and that can lift a total of parts where a shorter person can reach it or a taller person doesn't have to reach down quite as far and a vacuum lift is very helpful to if you have an area for a vacuum lift. We find that when a person comes to work at seven o'clock that by nine o'clock that first break that's typically the amount of time we would want them to work in a certain work center. Now certainly not every work center but the ones that are especially taxing on the hands and the motions and the arms and the lifting and they'll rotate to the next work center within that team if it's appropriate and we find that that gives people a variety of things to do. They enjoy their jobs more but it also lets those muscles have a rest that that specific group of muscles that they might have used whether it be lifting or using a screw gun or a nail gun or perhaps in a spray booth where they're doing a lot of triggering they need to let that rest. Because of some of the things that we've changed as far as like angled tables and some of the work centers that we have lift stations. People don't get as tired and they can produce as much starting in early in the day as they can later in the day. So I don't think we've seen anything that's really cost us especially in the long term. We find that most of the ergonomics things we put in place have really been very helpful not just in reducing injuries which is very important but also in productivity. The most important factor when I'm in a facility and I'm looking at an ergonomic program is to see that the employees are involved that they've received training that they know that there's a program that they recall the training that they have been trained and that there is some mechanism where the employees share that information with management. Years ago I saw a patient who worked at Sequence International for forming a job called spooling. She came to me complaining of right shoulder pain and described that her job required her to go like this all day long. So she was turning a crank with her right arm and with her right shoulder elevated and then constant motion. It turned out that she had a condition called rotator cuff tendonitis and because this can be serious Lori Kellogg from the Union's Health and Safety Department went out to Sequence. What I started with was just confidential health symptoms surveys of the workers and I found out that almost 75% of them were experiencing pretty serious pain of some kind or another and some of them very serious pain. And I took that information to management without giving any names just the aggregate results and we started talking about what a serious problem there was in this factory and how the union could help. I'm working here almost 30 years. I've done most jobs in the factory so I'm pretty familiar with most of the processes. I am plant have been plant manager and currently human resource director. When I first heard that we had a problem in a particular department called the spooling department I wasn't so sure I believe that the problem was being caused within the factory. I started off with videotaping the jobs all different positions each of the workers and those videotapes were used to further educate management, the supervisors and the workers. We did extensive educational programs with the supervisors and the workers so that everybody could give their ideas about what was wrong with the job and how to find solutions. She came down we looked at some videos and got some education, the supervisors and some of management and realized at that point that the process that we were asking the workers to do was certainly adding to this couple tunnel syndrome problem. The classes we had were very helpful educational because it taught us to explain where the symptoms were coming from, where we had the symptoms and how we were to go about it. In reviewing OSHA 200 logs it's important to realize that often what will be written is a symptom such as right shoulder pain so that for example the garment worker I saw who came with right shoulder pain turned out to have a rotator cuff tendinitis but that would have been reported as right shoulder pain. Carpal tunnel syndrome might be reported as wrist, hand or finger pain or even numbness. So it's important to realize that symptoms of pain, numbness, tingling, soreness anywhere from the neck down into the arms can be due to specific upper extremity musculoskeletal diseases. Some of the people that haven't complained about problems that exist when they see improvements are being made will then feel confident that they can talk about some of the pains they have. So I know that when I talk to some people about putting in ergonomic programs initially they take a big hit on their comp insurance because that's when you open up Pandora's box but the long term it ends up reversing. We have gone from one year having $96,000 in comp claims, 18 cases being carpal syndrome to in 1996 we had $4,500 in comp claims. In five cases none of them being carpal syndromes. The most important thing that we've learned about the ergonomics process is that there's one group of people who knows what problems are and can figure out the solutions and that is the workers who are doing the jobs and you have to give a lot of room for them to criticize, to be involved in the process, to make complaints, to be honest about the symptoms they're feeling and then really respect the suggestions that they make for improving the machine. An ergonomics project really has to include a lot of different elements. There has to be a plan for looking at medical issues and medical management. How are people going to be dealt with when they have injuries? There needs to be a participatory process for job analysis and job redesign and there needs to be evaluation after the project and as you go along in the project you need to look at what you're doing, how people are reacting to it, what their feedback is and whether they like certain changes or want to see other things change. It needs to be an open structure where there is full participation by the workers and the management and supervisors. If there's a message to give anybody about trying to take a look at what's being done in your factory and see if you can make some improvement, certainly ergonomically, the message I would say is that as small as you might be there is a lot that you can do and it doesn't always require large sums of money. This is not an issue of comfort, this is an issue of health. We learned in this process that if you're trying to incorporate your workers into making a business successful you cannot ask them to extend themselves on one end if you don't listen to what their problems are on the other and I think that's where we came from. People just became so much happier in the workplace and doing their job, it's kind of like they got rid of all the annoyances and all the things that bothered them you know day in and day out on a daily basis and they didn't have to do that anymore, be disturbed by that anymore so they could concentrate on things that impacted the business issues. We know these programs work with management commitment, total employee involvement, you know dedication to the job, you'll get excellent results.