More Workers Hurt : Productivity Push: Peril on the Job?

“My fingers go numb. Then the swelling in my wrists comes, and my fingers won’t move.

“Finally, my left hand goes dead. My hand just starts tingling, and then it falls asleep. It just happens, sometimes when I’m driving.

“I was on the job five years before I got hurt. But the chain speed (on the production line) just got so fast. . . . The doctor said my wrists just wore out.”

--Gary Shadbolt, a 32-year-old worker at the huge IBP meatpacking plant in Dakota City, Neb., and a victim of work-related wrist and hand injuries.

“Really, I was doing the jobs of four people--they laid off the three other guys I was working with and combined the jobs into one.

“I had to use two different sledgehammers to stamp the steel slabs coming down the line, and it was real hot out there, like 168 degrees. When something went wrong, I had to stop the line and climb up four stories to work the repair crane. It was real strenuous on me.

“One day, I started feeling faint. I got real hot, then my chest--I thought I was going to die. I found out it was an angina attack. . . . I spent six days in the hospital.”

--Tom Stanton, a 45-year-old worker at USX Corp.’s sprawling Gary, Ind., steelworks.

The nation may be paying a hidden price for its highly publicized drive to regain its competitive edge: There is growing concern that the push for ever higher levels of productivity in some of the country’s most depressed basic industries is leading to more frequent injuries among American factory workers.

To improve productivity and lower costs, manufacturing industries have been slashing employment levels while seeking to maintain relatively high rates of output. As a result, safety experts believe that many of those manufacturers are frequently reducing their labor costs by piling up extra duties on workers--like Shadbolt and Stanton--who then get hurt as they try to keep up.

‘Deteriorate Rapidly’

“It’s a simple equation,” says Deborah Berkowitz, director of the safety and health program for the AFL-CIO’s Food and Allied Service Trades Department, and an expert on injuries in the meatpacking industry. “When an industry like meatpacking steadily increases line speeds while simultaneously cutting work force levels, safety and health conditions deteriorate rapidly.”

Industrial safety experts note that big layoffs in troubled industries should have resulted in safer workplaces, by removing the least experienced--and thus most injury-prone--workers from their jobs. Traditionally, injury rates go down during economic slumps and rise during boom times, when new workers are hired.

Instead, the opposite has happened, at least in part because more and more work is being loaded onto fewer and fewer employees, some experts believe.

Groups like the National Assn. of Manufacturers, a Washington-based trade group, insist that industrial safety remains a top priority of American business. But a wide range of federal statistics shows that injury rates in manufacturing have increased since the recession of the early 1980s even as employment levels have remained stagnant or declined.

Federal statistics for 1984 and 1985, the most recent years for which numbers are available, show overall manufacturing injuries nearly 12% higher than levels in 1983, including big increases in industries such as meatpacking, steel, machine tools and metal fabricating.

“Anytime that the employer puts pressure on the workers, to do more, do it faster, do it a little bit quicker, and speed up the normal operating procedure, there is probably a higher risk of injuries,” acknowledges Frank Frodyma, associate director of the policy staff at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

‘Increase the Risk’

“If you increase the line speed or the work content on the job, and make it more repetitive, you’re going to increase the risk,” says Tom Armstrong, a specialist in work-related injuries at the Center for Ergonomics at the University of Michigan. “It’s really hard to quantify, but my impression is that those pressures have increased, through increased line speeds.

“Certainly, the productivity pressures are being felt everywhere in domestic industry.”

But union officials say the problems may be worse than the federal government realizes. They charge than even the climbing injury rate reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics is understated. They say there is widespread under-reporting of injuries by business and lax enforcement of work safety regulations by the Reagan Administration.

The climbing injury rates come at a time when American businesses are being confronted by an unprecedented challenge from imports and are being squeezed by depressed commodity prices and excess domestic production in many sectors. As a result, businesses in a wide range of industries have come under almost unbearable pressure to cut costs.

Improved Productivity

American industry has responded by dramatically improving labor productivity since the last recession. Between November, 1982, and December, 1986, for example, manufacturing output rose 30.8%, while manufacturing employment increased by just 5.6% during the same period, say statistics compiled by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Federal Reserve Board. The trends have been even more telling over the last year; while output rose 2.2% from December, 1985, to last December, manufacturing employment declined 0.5%

Certainly, much of that productivity gain is a result of the increased use of factory automation and the development of more efficient production practices in American manufacturing plants.

But some labor officials charge that some companies also have been cutting corners in ways that indirectly threaten safety conditions. Besides overloading employees with work, they say, some firms also have cut back on employee training and equipment maintenance. That’s happening at a time, they note, when many workers are being transferred into unfamiliar and hazardous jobs to take the places of others already laid off.

Newer Workers Bumped

“There’s no question that’s a problem in steel,” complains Melena Barkman, assistant safety director for the United Steelworkers. “Crew sizes in the mills are being cut,” resulting in transfers of workers throughout the plants, as senior workers whose jobs have been eliminated bump less senior workers out of their jobs, she notes. “And the workers taking on the new jobs aren’t receiving adequate training when they are shifted,” she says.

Management safety experts around the country disagree that production pressures have led to worsening injury rates, however, and argue that manufacturing is actually much safer than it has ever been.

“It’s my impression that the concern for safety has never been higher, not only because of a concern for the workers, but because workers’ compensation costs companies have to pay when employees are injured have never been higher,” says Sharon Spigelmyer, director of loss prevention for the National Assn. of Manufacturers.

Rating Tied to Safety

“There is no question that companies are trying to improve productivity, but that’s not diminishing their efforts to improve safety. In fact, every company I deal with now ties a plant manager’s performance rating to plant safety. That would give managers an incentive not to go for higher productivity at the sake of safety,” Spigelmyer says.

“Within responsible companies, safety is still being made an integral part of the daily operations and ranks in importance along with productivity and quality,” says Gary Barnett, manager of safety and health for Nabisco Brands Inc. and chairman of the manufacturers association’s occupational safety and health policy committee.

Still, the results of the increased competitive pressures on manufacturers do seem to be showing up in the nation’s workplace injury statistics. John Moran, director of the division of safety research for the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health in Morgantown, W. Va., one of the federal government’s top researchers on occupational safety, notes that injury rates for all industry rose a sharp 11.7% in 1984, about twice the 6.6% rate of increase in total hours worked during the year. That implies, Moran says, that pressures to increase employee output were having an impact on safety. (Injury rates for all industry in 1985, the most recent year for which statistics are available, remained at 1984’s higher levels.)

Enormous Stress

The effects of production pressures on safety seem especially visible in two of the nation’s most troubled basic industries, meatpacking and steel, where injury rates among workers like Shadbolt and Stanton have surged while employment levels have plunged. Both industries are under enormous stress; steel has been unable to cope with foreign competition, and American meatpackers have been suffering through a wrenching shakeout resulting from declining beef consumption and falling commodity prices.

In steel, for example, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that, at the nation’s blast furnaces and basic steel product operations, lost workdays caused by injuries rose from 77.7 per 100 workers in 1982 to 97.7 per 100 workers in 1985, while employment plunged from 394,300 to 304,900 during the same period. The total number of injury cases also rose, from 10.1 per 100 workers in 1982 to 10.5 per 100 workers in 1985.

In a related Bureau of Labor Statistics category covering blast furnaces and steel mills, total injury cases rose from 8.4 per 100 workers in 1982 to 8.6 per 100 workers in 1985, while employment plummeted from 325,100 to 237,700. Lost workdays caused by injuries also rose, from 63.4 per 100 workers in 1982 to 85 in 1985.

‘Merit Some Attention’

“We believe these are trends going on all across the basic industries we represent, in metals, mining and metal fabrication industries,” says Mike Wright, safety director for the United Steelworkers.

A spokesman for the American Iron and Steel Institute, a steel industry trade group, concedes that the government’s injury statistics “merit some attention.” He says the injury rates in the steel industry may have come in part as a result of sweeping new technologies being introduced throughout the industry. The installation of new equipment may be leading to more accidents as workers learn how to operate the new machinery.

“We have to pay attention to the problem,” he said. “There are fewer workers; there is new technology and there is a learning curve involved.”

In meatpacking, the number of lost workdays caused by injuries soared from 166.7 days per 100 workers in 1982 to 246.1 days per 100 workers in 1985, while total employment in the industry fell from 146,900 to 141,700. The number of nonfatal accidents in which workers did not miss work rose from 12.5 per 100 workers in 1982 to 15.2 per 100 workers in 1985.

Concern About Injuries

“What you have here is an industry not being held accountable for the injury problems it has wrought,” Berkowitz charges.

“We have not seen persuasive evidence that things are getting worse,” responds Robert Hibbert, vice president and general counsel for the American Meat Institute, a trade group for meatpackers. But Hibbert acknowledged that the trade group is concerned about the current level of injuries in the industry and said it hopes to issue new safety guidelines this year for its members.

But meatpacking and steel are not alone; worsening safety conditions seem to be plaguing a broad range of other manufacturing sectors as well. In the machine tool industry, for instance, total injuries per 100 workers rose from 11.3 in 1982 to 12.1 in 1985, while employment fell from 314,900 to 310,500. And, in the broad category of metal fabricating, the injury rate per 100 workers rose from 18 in 1982 to 20.3 in 1985, while employment dipped from 456,300 to 441,300.

Incentive to Falsify Reports

Meanwhile, labor officials complain that injury rates in many manufacturing industries are actually much worse than the federal statistics disclose, because of Reagan Administration policies that have given employers an unintentional incentive to falsify injury reports.

OSHA now focuses most of its manufacturing plant inspections on industries that report injury statistics that are above the national average for all industrial workplaces. It specifically targets plants and companies within those industries that report injury rates that are above the national average for those high-risk fields. (Construction site inspections account for as much as half of all OSHA inspections and are not part of the same targeting policy.)

Safety experts in the labor movement argue that companies thus have an incentive to under-report injuries in order to remain below the national average and so avoid federal inspections.

“When OSHA announced that companies could get exemptions from inspections based on their injury rates, that made injury rate figures a fairly useless measure of plant safety,” says Franklin Mirer, director of health and safety for the United Auto Workers.

Study of Records

Federal officials acknowledge that they are concerned that false reporting by corporations could undermine federal injury statistics. Recently, Janet L. Norwood, commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, expressed concern about the completeness of the corporate record-keeping upon which the government’s 1985 survey of occupational injuries was based.

And OSHA is now conducting a two-state study of injury records to determine how extensive the problem has become in manufacturing plants. The agency has also proposed huge fines for several major corporations, including Union Carbide Corp., Chrysler Corp. and USX Corp., formerly U.S. Steel, for willfully filing false injury statements. Chrysler has just agreed to pay $295,000 for under-reporting injury statistics at several plants, the largest fine ever paid to OSHA.

“We depend to some extent on employers in our targeting policy to keep accurate records; that’s why we take this problem so seriously when we find willful violations, and why we have levied such large fines,” OSHA spokesman Terry Mikelson says. “If there is a problem out there we intend to correct it.”

Little Research

At the same time, safety experts concede that little or no scientific research has ever been conducted to precisely measure the relationship between productivity pressures and injury rates. Still, Moran and a few other federal officials now believe that the trends in the Bureau of Labor Statistics figures do indicate that such pressures are taking their toll on workplace safety in some depressed industries.

“What research we do have indicates that, where one is involved in repetitive tasks and the work rate increases, one gets to a threshold where the error rate, and the injury rate, climb dramatically,” Moran says.

But some experts now argue that workers on the line are the best judges of what is happening and that their experiences offer better proof than any federal studies now available. “Without any research, the best evidence right now is anecdotal,” says Peg Seminario, associate director for health and safety at the AFL-CIO.

“If the workers say something is happening, they are probably right.”

Labor Disputes

Shadbolt, Stanton, and many of their co-workers in IBP’s Dakota City plant and USX’s Gary mill agree that they don’t need any more research. Indeed, the impact that production pressures can have on injuries seems especially apparent at both facilities, and safety has been a key issue in labor disputes at both facilities over the last year.

“The chain speed never seems to end, they’re always wanting it higher,” says a frustrated Terry Bottger, 25, who has worked at IBP for just over five years. “The chain speed has doubled in my department since I started.

“My hands were hurting, and they (management) just gave me muscle relaxant and put me back to work. It (the muscle relaxant) didn’t help. The only thing that will help is slower speeds and more people on the line.”

Charlie Johnson, a layout machine operator at USX’s Gary mill, says: “You can’t have safety, man. Instead of doing one job, you got guys doing four.”