Analysis
The personal safety and wellness of staff have never before been more important to employers. No one really knows the impact of health hazards on the job. With the latency periods for cancer anywhere from 20 to 30 years it is often hard to trace the cause of illness back to the job site.1 The main statute protecting the health and safety of workers in the workplace is the Occupational and Safety Health Act (OSHA). Congress enacted this legislation under its Constitutional grant of authority to regulate interstate commerce. OSHA requires the Secretary of Labor to promulgate regulations and safety and health standards to protect employees and their families. Every private employer who engages in interstate commerce is subject to the regulations promulgated under OSHA.2
Despite the grim statistical evidence that job hazards continue long after the passage of OSHA, press coverage of worksite health and safety issues is sporadic and most often nonexistent. The one exception is repetitive motion injuries which have ridden into newsrooms nationwide on computer keyboards. But even here the coverage tends to focus inward with little attention paid to the slaughterhouses, packing plants and assembly fines where repetitive motion injuries outpace the incidence among office workers.3
Today's typical Americans - busy and health conscious - demand that their local grocery store be well stocked with lean, easy-to-cook meat. As a result, the number of poultry processors in this country has almost doubled since 1980, while workers now clean and gut chickens - a numbingly repetitive task - at nearly twice the pace they once did.
Repetitive-stress injuries - flaring pain in the fingers and wrist - are now a near epidemic on the chicken assembly line.
Congress, however, barred the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) last year from creating rules designed to prevent such injuries, even though they account for one of every three workers' compensation dollars, for $2.7 million a year in workers' compensation claims and for an annual $20 billion in costs to employers.4
This April, California was expected to become the first state in the country to adopt regulations requiring businesses to reduce these injuries. The so-called "ergonomics standard" involved much toil and debate, but it demonstrates how the states - in the absence of federal laws or guidelines - have taken charge of protecting workers' health and safety. States are tackling everything from ergonomics to on-the-job violence, from getting tobacco out. of the office to encouraging workers to eat better, exercise more, drink less and unwind oftener.
There are some safety and health professionals who say the role of aggressively protecting the nation's workers can best be filled by the federal government. David Hunnicutt, president of the Wellness Councils of America, a nonprofit organization of 3,000 companies trying to encourage healthy workers, says the move to improve working conditions has come a remarkable distance in a very, very short time. "I think the federal government has played a tremendous role in assisting American work sites."
"States are light years ahead of the federal government," says Peg Seminario, the AFL-CIO health and safety director who remains frustrated by the lack of - or impotence of - federal laws governing the work site.
Getting federal regulations for workplace chemicals, for instance, can take up to a decade from the time the chemical is first recognized as potentially harmful, Seminario says. Even when federal regulations exist, she says, they are sometimes either too weak or too weakly enforced to satisfy the nation's labor and medical communities.
Lead in the workplace, for instance, remains a frustration to medical professionals who believe that the existing thresholds - the levels of lead in the blood that the federal government deems acceptable - are still too high. Too much lead in the blood can lead to fatigue, high blood pressure, and, in extreme cases, seizures and kidney damage. As a result, some states and even some businesses that use lead in their manufacturing have taken it on themselves to create their own stricter standards.
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