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Caves to business lobby
OSHA pulls rule on reporting ergonomics injuries
By DON McINTOSH
Associate Editor
OSHA — the federal agency in
charge of making workplaces safer —
announced Jan. 25 that it will hold off
asking employers to record muscu-
loskeletal disorders like carpal tunnel on
a form they already fill out for work-re-
lated injuries. OSHA (which stands for
Occupational Safety and Health Ad-
ministration) said it was taking the ac-
tion to “seek greater input from small
businesses on the impact of the pro-
posal.”
But small business groups already
weighed in extensively with hearing
testimony and written comments. They
were critical of the change, even though
it doesn’t affect small businesses for the
most part. OSHA spokesperson Diana
Petterson says less than 15 percent of
small businesses are required to fill out
the form. Businesses with under 10 em-
ployees — and businesses in low-haz-
ard industries or office environments —
aren’t required to fill out the form.
Peg Seminario, director of the Safety
and Health Department of the national
AFL-CIO labor federation, says there’s
no merit to business groups’ claim that
reporting musculoskeletal disorders
(MSDs) would be burdensome. She
says the groups’ real fear is that if they
start counting MSDs, they may at some
later stage have to spend money to pre-
vent them.
MSDs — which can be caused by
repetitive motion or overexertion — af-
flict the muscles, nerves, tendons, liga-
ments, joints, cartilage and spinal discs
of millions of workers. Examples in-
clude carpal tunnel syndrome, sciatica,
tendinitis, herniated spinal discs, and
lower back pain. MSDs accounted for
28 percent of all reported workplace in-
juries and illnesses in 2009, according
to an annual survey conducted by the
Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Organized labor has fought for
decades to get employers to take MSDs
seriously, but business groups have re-
sisted government intervention.
This latest fight is about OSHA’s
Form 300, a log that is filled out by em-
ployers whenever a work-related injury
or illness causes a worker to seek med-
ical treatment, lose work time or restrict
the kinds of tasks they can perform. For
decades, the log included a box indicat-
ing that the injury was caused by “cu-
mulative trauma.” But the box didn’t
distinguish between hearing loss and
musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs). In
January 2001, OSHA gave noise-related
illness and MSDs their own separate
columns. Then the newly-installed ad-
ministration of George W. Bush stepped
in and eliminated the MSD column.
The administration of Barack
Obama has taken its time reversing that
move. OSHA proposed to restore the
MSD column, held a March 2010 hear-
ing, took comment, finalized a draft rule
change, and sent it in July 2010 to the
Office of Management and Budget for
review. Now OSHA says it’s temporar-
ily withdrawing the change from OMB
review until it can have “an active dia-
logue between the agency and the small
business community.”
“We were stunned,” said the AFL-
CIO’s Seminario. “This is basically a
tool to use in the workplace to identify
which of these injuries are MSDs,
which hopefully will focus attention by
employers on how to prevent them. If
they’re responding this way to a small
rule with a minimal impact, we’re quite
concerned how they’ll respond to rules
that have an bigger impact.”
Seminario said the U.S. Chamber of
Commerce and other groups have been
vocally opposing this rule and others for
many months — with ideological, not
substantive objections.
The Chamber argues that MSDs
aren’t well enough defined, that they
rely on workers’ unverifiable claims of
pain and discomfort, and that it’s too
hard to determine the precise cause, in-
cluding whether an MSD is work-re-
lated or pre-existing.
OSHA’s announcement that it’s
withdrawing the proposed rule change
came one week after President Obama
issued an executive order that all federal
regulatory agencies must review new
and existing rules to make sure they’re
the least burdensome.
“I am directing federal agencies to
do more to account for — and reduce
— the burdens regulations may place
on small businesses,” Obama wrote in
a Wall Street Journal op-ed piece ex-
plaining the order.
To put all this in context: OSHA has
been studying MSDs for 31 years.
MSDs are often brought about by work-
spaces that are not designed with er-
gonomic considerations in mind. The
White House is in charge of executive
branch agencies like OSHA. In No-
vember 2000, just as President Bill
Clinton wrapped up his eight years in
office, OSHA announced a new rule
that would have required employers to
implement ergonomics programs if
they had musculoskeletal injuries in a
workplace. But the U.S. Chamber of
Commerce declared it a top priority to
repeal the rule, and a Republican-led
Congress obliged, overturning the rule
in March 2001, before it took effect.
In short, the Obama Administration
has not sought to require employers to
do anything about MSDs, and now it’s
backing off requiring employers even to
report them … at least until OSHA has
a chance to hear some more from small
business groups about the impact of
adding a check box to an existing form.
To get more small business feedback
on the proposal to add an MSD column
to Form 300, OSHA and the U.S. Small
Business Administration’s Office of Ad-
vocacy will be jointly hosting a meet-
ing, details of which will be announced
by the end of February.
“After this small business meeting,”
said Petterson, the OSHA spokesper-
son, “OSHA will review the comments
and concerns regarding the proposed
rule, prior to submitting it back to the
OMB.”
(Editor’s Note: Oregon and Wash-
ington are two of 25 states that develop
and operate their own job safety and
health programs. Federal OSHA ap-
proves and monitors all state plans.
Neither state has an ergonomics stan-
dard or separate reporting requirement
for musculoskeletal disorders.)
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NORTHWEST LABOR PRESS
FEBRUARY 18, 2011