Employee safety is first but there’s no “one size fits all” solution to ergonomics
White Watkins, vice president of human resources and safety with the American Furniture Manufacturer’s Association, discusses the importance of the AFMA safety training video series, as well as proposed federal ergonomics regulation. Watkins serves as an in-house consultant for member companies, as well as liaison with the U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
What are the major safety issues for the residential furniture industry?
Safety orientation and training is a very important issue for us, and that goes all the way from lockout-tagout to hazard communication, machine guarding, incident investigation, powered industrial trucks (forklifts), electrical training, manual materials handling training, personal protective equipment training and fire prevention training.
What is the most important safety issue?
To familiarize and train our employees in a myriad of subjects in order to provide them with the knowledge base they need to properly safekeep themselves and properly perform their job.
Is that why safety is the focus of your videos?
That’s a good question and the answer is yes. About three and a half years ago, our deep concern for the safety of our employees caused us to start searching for furniture specific safety training materials. Under the guidance of the AFMA safety committee, which is chaired by Wayne Bumgardner, corporate safety manager of Bernhardt Furniture Co. in Lenoir, N.C., the development of these safety-training materials began. The safety committee has now completed seven videos prepared both in English and Spanish, along with an instructor’s guide and knowledge-retention forms. The committee is now working on numbers eight, nine and ten. Eight is electrical safety. Nine is manual materials handling, and ten is fire prevention. These will be premiered at our world-class AFMA human resources/safety conference-expo on Sept. 13-16.
What safety issue do you see on the horizon for the furniture industry?
Ergonomics. This is the subject that the furniture industry has been working on a long time and will continue working on as long as there are employees and there is a furniture industry. There is no simple answer to ergonomics, and ergonomics cuts across all industry lines as well as public sector employment. The physical condition that we humans maintain of our own body has a very important bearing on this issue. There is no one size fits all to this subject. Long before the states and federal government got interested in this subject, we as an industry have been working on this matter and we’re going to continue to. But we don’t have all of the answers and neither does OSHA.
Do you think federal ergonomics regulation is needed? Why?
No, I do not because there are no simple answers. How many repetitions are too many repetitions? How many times of lifting or whatever is too many? They do not know and neither do we. Let me hasten to add that does not mean in the least that we are not concerned about the safety and health of our employees. We do not want to see them injured and that is why we are working every single day continuing to seek out solutions to ergonomic related issues.
What’s the status of these pending regulations?
Congress has mandated that the Department of Labor delay the implementation of the ergonomics regulation for a year, and I think that pretty much makes the point that Congress has some reservations for the implementation of this regulation.... just like we do.
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