Chrysler Offers Plan to Prevent Work Injuries : Workplace: A program to identify and avoid problems caused by repetitive-motion jobs will be an industry first.
WASHINGTON — After more than two years of protracted negotiations with the government and its unions, Chrysler Corp. Thursday agreed to set up the first major program to deal with repetitive-motion injuries in the automobile industry.
The agreement will immediately affect 60,000 production workers at Chrysler and is likely to be expanded to cover more than 400,000 others at General Motors and Ford. It marks only the second time a major industry has agreed to set up a program to prevent the type of injuries that public-health specialists say are increasingly common as more jobs require long periods of performing the same activity. Last year the Labor Department reached a similar agreement with IBP Inc., the nation’s biggest meatpacker.
Under the Chrysler agreement, the company will study the assembly-line jobs at its Belvedere, Ill., plant and then make changes. Whatever Chrysler does at Belevedere will be used in its other assembly operations within the next three years.
OSHA cited the Belvedere plant in late 1986 for repetitive-motion injuries in 13 job categories. That complaint led to the negotiations that resulted in Thursday’s agreement. Under the program announced Thursday, Chrysler will initiate comprehensive programs at five major plants where assembly-line jobs have resulted in often-crippling nerve and muscle injuries and thousands of hours of lost work time.
In some cases, a problem can be corrected by simply having workers perform different tasks during the course of the day or changing the angle of a tool’s handle to reduce the strain on the wrist.
Other changes could require expensive “engineering controls” that basically shift the strain of a job to a machine. Chrysler will also review all the jobs in its plants, under the watchful eye of the government, to determine the best means of correcting the problems.
In recent years, job redesign has become a major concern across a wide range of industries from meatpacking to data processing where “nerve entrapment” injuries, such as carpal-tunnel syndrome and tendonitis, have emerged as major hazards of the modern workplace.
The Chrysler agreement was worked out with the Labor Department’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the United Auto Workers, which represents employees at Chrysler’s assembly plants. Labor Secretary Elizabeth Hanford Dole said Thursday that labor-management cooperation is a key to making such agreements work.
A Chrysler spokesman called the agreement “the right thing to do for our employees and our business. Everyone wins with this agreement.”
The UAW agrees. “We think it’s a good agreement,” said a UAW official who has been monitoring the negotiations with Chrysler and the government. He said the agreement signals that “OSHA’s attention has come back to the auto industry.”
He predicts that the changes could cost Chrysler as much as an additional 60 cents an hour per worker in labor costs. UAW members currently average $15.26 an hour at Chrysler.
Frank Mirer, UAW health and safety director, has estimated that as many as 50% of the union’s members have a health problem that is a result of poor job design and that one in 10 has a repeated trauma disorder each year.
Since last year OSHA has targeted repetitive-motion injuries for special enforcement emphasis. Like the agreement with IBP, which has resulted in job changes and in some cases new positions in its Dakota City, Neb., meat-processing plant, Thursday’s is expected to serve as a pattern for dealing with other industries on the problem.
Jerry Scannel, assistant secretary of labor in charge of OSHA, said cumulative trauma injuries “pose a particular threat in auto-assembly operations because of the nature of much of the work.”
Until recently, repetitive-motion injuries were largely viewed as part of the aging process and as unrelated to work. Government experts--part of a growing field known as ergonomics, the science of adapting the workplace to the worker--are unsure whether there is an increasing industry problem or whether the disorder is simply better understood today.
A major cause of problems is the increased use of computers and word processors by office workers. In the data-processing area, for example, government experts estimate that some computer-entry jobs require as many as 23,000 key strokes a day almost without relief.
The spurt of automation in basic industries over the last decade has also contributed to the problem, according to government scientists at the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health. As companies automate to boost productivity they often adopt equipment that increases the number of repetitive motions required by a job.
