FLORIDA CHAPTER SYSTEM SAFETY SOCIETY

SUBJECT: Meeting Minutes for September 30, 1997

Place: Cocoa Beach Hilton

Topic: OSHA's Ergonomic Standard

Speaker: Dr. David Cochran

Minutes:

Members of the Florida chapter attended a joint meeting of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, the American Society of Safety Engineers, the System Safety Society, and the American Society of Quality Control in Cocoa Beach on September 30. The topic of the meeting was progress toward an ergonomics standard by OSHA. The speaker was Dr. David Cochran, Special Assistant for Ergonomics OSHA, Washington.

Dr. Cochran started out by describing OSHA's four-pronged approach to ergonomics: Education - OSHA is reaching out to industry, business and small industry to try to get the message of good ergonomic practice across. This includes Best Practices Conferences being held in each region around the country. The conferences let industries share their success stories and learn from the experience of others. Research - Research is being conducted and the results disseminated on the OSHA web page. Enforcement - Enforcement is on-going with lots of smaller ergonomics cases being pursued through the general duty clause. Rule Making - This is the area where Dr. Cochran is involved. The history of ergonomics standards at OSHA starts with the Meatpacking industry guidelines which were developed for that specific industry in response to the problems there, but are now used by a broad spectrum of industry. Then, in 1991, OSHA started thinking about a guideline for general industry. This process eventually lead to the Draft Standard. The Draft Standard provoked such negative reaction from industry that Congress is still limiting OSHA's activity in the ergonomics field through riders on OSHA funding legislation. In the past few years, OSHA has been prevented from even doing research on the topic. At this point, the agency is prevented from issuing a standard, but not working on one.

Dr. Cochran emphasized that the rule-making process is so long and involved that it will be several years before the agency could come up with a standard even without congressional limits. He also stated that not one word of a standard has been written at this point. But the direction they are taking is toward a programmatic standard, that is one which requires a typical OSHA program including monitoring, training, recordkeeping, evaluation, etc. The old Draft Standard had included large appendices providing information on how to design for good ergonomics and a checklist for finding potential problems. Due to criticism of these elements, they will be published as separate documents, not part of the standard. The eventual standard will most likely include a trigger feature like the Draft Standard did and California's standard does. This means that only workplaces with a history of work-related musculoskeletal injuries need to implement a program.

Dr. Cochran concluded by asking for help and input by all concerned with the process of standard development. He also stated that it is important to refute the misinformation on the negative aspects of ergonomic standards promulgated by adversaries to a standard. He gave his phone number as: (202) 219-7075 x103.

The next meeting of the HFES is November 5. Watch the SSS home page for information on our next meeting.

Meeting minutes submitted by John Wolf, secretary, Florida Chapter, System Safety Society.