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Presidential race revives workplace debate

By Gregory Lopes
December 3, 2007

SERVICE WITH A SMILE: Giant Food deli clerk Fen Milne painlessly served a customer at the Chevy Chase store. The company designs its facilities to prevent ergonomic injuries.

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A Democratic victory in the 2008 presidential election would reignite the fight between big labor and big business over a contentious workplace-safety issue.

The mere mention of ergonomics, the arcane science that has come to symbolize workplace injuries ranging from sore backs to carpal tunnel syndrome, can cause employers pain. But to the nation's labor unions, ergonomics — leading to the No. 1 cause of workplace injuries in the United States — is an issue of the utmost importance.

Ergonomic injuries accounted for nearly 360,000 of the more than 1 million injuries that occurred in U.S. workplaces last year, according to the Bureau of Labor of Statistics. That number has been on the decline since 2000, when 578,000 such injuries occurred, but still accounts for 40 percent of all injuries on the job.

The return of the ergonomics debate to politics conjures up a historic lobbying campaign that resulted in the overturning of one of organized labor's most significant triumphs. Two months after President Bush took office, a Republican Congress, making first use of its newly acquired power to review regulations, repealed the biggest worker-safety policy of the Clinton years, the now-defunct ergonomics regulation.

The repeal of the regulation, as well as the Bush administration's decision not to issue other major workplace-safety rules, delighted the business community but embittered organized labor.

Now, and as presidential politics heats up, nearly every Democratic candidate vying for the 2008 nomination has stated that some form of ergonomics standard would benefit America's workers, according to a recent survey conducted by the AFL-CIO.

"Today's workers are particularly susceptible to debilitating musculoskeletal injuries," said Sen. Barack Obama, Illinois Democrat. "Although [the Occupational Safety and Health Administration] issued a standard based on successful business practices in reducing these costly injuries, President Bush and a Republican Congress negated this progress by repealing the standard. As president, I would reinstate the ergonomics rule and make sure that we create a policy that supports workers."

The front-runner for the Democratic nomination, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, New York Democrat, supported an ergonomics regulation in her initial days in Congress and continues to back the idea during her run for the White House.

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