BW Online | November 30, 1999 | OSHA Feels Your Pain: The New Ergonomic Regs

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NOVEMBER 30, 1999

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OSHA Feels Your Pain: The New Ergonomic Regs
A selection of resources to help small biz cope

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Feel a persistent pain since the Occupational Safety & Health Administration unveiled its 400 pages of proposed ergonomic regulations (including supporting documentation)? The new rules, if adopted as proposed, will require employers to take aggressive action — from monitoring to mitigation — to prevent repetitive stress injuries. And small businesses, OSHA says, have been particularly remiss in setting up preemptive programs. The agency says about 1.3 million establishments with fewer than 20 workers that have manufacturing or manual jobs will need a basic ergonomics program.

As with most health issues, a penny of prevention is worth many dollars of cure. With that in mind, here are some resources that can help readers get out in front of the problem:

— Business Week frontier's September package: "Ergonomics: The Comfort Zone," which lays out the facts on repetitive stress injuries and reasonably priced solutions.

— OSHA's own Web pages on the rules for small business http://www.osha-slc.gov/SmallBusiness/index.html.

— OSHA's Voluntary Protection Plan: How to become a paragon of occupational safety (http://www.osha.gov/oshprogs/vpp/).

— The proposed regulations themselves, in abridged form.

Alternatively, you can object to the rules. OSHA is taking comments till Feb. 1, 2000. For details on public participation, go to: http://www.osha-slc.gov/ergonomics-standard/publicparticipation.html