Month: March 2000

The Occupational Safety Health
Association recently did what it does best – proposing regulations that
won’t likely do much to improve the safety of American workers but could
dramatically increase costs for businesses.

The latest round of OSHA wastefulness
is aimed at preventing repetitive stress injuries. These are musculoskeletal
disorders that account for one third of all occupational injuries. The
new regulations will dictate ergonomic standards for businesses in an
effort to reduce the risk of RSI injuries. Unfortunately there is very
little scientific evidence available yet to indicate how to reduce the
risk of RSI’s, and such information is unlikely to be available anytime
soon.

The main problem in studying
RSIs being that they have numerous causes. As Jennifer Krause, director
of employment policy for the National Association of Manufacturers summed
it up, “There is lack of consensus in the scientific and medical communities
on the causes of MSDs (musculoskeletal disorders). Certainly not enough
to justify a rule of this magnitude.”

In fact although ergonomics
does in fact seem to play a role in some RSI injuries, deciding how much
of a role ergonomics plays or how to ameliorate RSIs by modifying ergonomics
is at best little more than guesswork.

As Russell E. Windsor, an orthopedic
surgeon and expert in joint replacement surgery, told CNN, “It is difficult
to apply critical, scientific methods to determine that a particular action
done repetitively over a number of hours will result in injury.” Factors
such as work schedules, the pace of work, time pressures, and other factors
can all contribute to musculoskeletal disorders, and deciding how to assign
the proportional risk among different factors is all but impossible.

OSHA counters that there are
quite a few success stories where employers reduced workplace injuries
by making ergonomic changes, but this highlights exactly why OSHA oversight
is problematic. But this undercuts OSHA’s very reasoning for new regulations.
Given the difficulty in finding an optimal ergonomic work environment,
the last thing businesses need are inflexible rules that might require
changes costing billions of dollars (even OSHA’s low-ball figure estimates
$4.6 billion annually to comply with its regulations) while producing
results that are unpredictable.

OSHA’s reflexive regulations
seem little more than a common Washington reaction — anytime any problem
is discovered, it must be regulated. Sometimes, though, such regulation
merely adds expensive requirements while producing minimal results. Such
is likely to be the case with OSHA’s ergonomic rules.

    The 5th U.S. Circuit Court
of Appeals recently turned down an appeal by a Texas cattleman of Oprah
Winfrey’s victory in the so-called “veggie libel” trial a couples years
ago.

    In that trial, the cattlemen
sued Winfrey over her April 16, 1996 show which featured animal rights
activist Howard Lyman discussing Mad Cow disease. Lyman went on with his
usual histrionics about Mad Cow disease, with flourishes claiming that
Mad Cow could possibly kill millions of people in the United States, prompting
Winfrey to say she’d never eat another hamburger again.

    Beef sales, and prices, dropped
dramatically in the wake of the show (it is frightening to think that
so many Americans get dietary advice from a day-time talk show) , and
the cattlemen sued in Texas under a law that makes disparaging a food
product a tort. Unfortunately for the cattlemen, the trial judge ruled
that the law did not apply to meat (it had originally been written to
cover fruits and vegetables specifically) and the cattlemen had to sue
Winfrey under the much stricter libel laws.

    The appeal, initiated by Paul
Engler who has vowed to appeal the Winfrey verdict as far as possible,
argued that the trial judge erred in not allowing the suit to continue
under the veggie libel provision.

    Hopefully this will spell the
end of this ridiculous chapter-the lawsuit’s main affect was to make the
cattlemen look like a bunch of whiners. As the Appeals Court put it,

Stripped to its essentials, the cattlemen’s complaint is that
the ‘Dangerous Food’ show did not present the mad cow issue in the light
most favorable to United States beef. This argument cannot stand.

    Lyman might be a nut and Winfrey
a fool, but even nuts and fools are protected by the First Amendment (and
thankfully so — all Engler’s vindictive legal tactics have done is further
legitimize Lyman’s bizarre views).

Reference:

Oprah’s
win over cattlemen upheld. Janet McConnaughey, Associated Press, February
9, 2000.