Health and safety: US labour union accuses Bush of safety sidestep

US president George W Bush is being accused of presiding over a 'sham' on employee safety, after his administration announced a series of forums on workplace injuries.

The accusation comes from leading labour organisation, the American Federation of Labour and Congress of Industrial Organisations (AFL-CIO). It believes the forums will be used to sweep aside the case for increasing protection for people injured at work.

The forums, the first two of which take place next week on 16 and 17 July, will address what the US government deems to be three vital questions in the field of ergonomics:

What is an ergonomic injury? How can the department of health's occupational safety and health administration employers and employees determine whether such an injury was caused by work-related or non-work-related activities? And what would be the most useful and cost-effective government response?

The AFL-CIO believes the questions are too narrow and has condemned the forums as a thinly disguised attempt to define the problem away.

In January this year, a joint report by the National Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Medicine put the number of serious work-related ergonomic injuries at one million a year. Most injuries are caused by heavy lifting, repetitive work or poorly designed jobs.

Labour secretary Elaine Chao said the forums would be used to develop guiding principles as a vital starting point for evaluating the issues and deciding a final course of action.

But union activists claim the Bush administration has already demonstrated its intentions by killing a new standard on ergonomic injuries during its first days in office. Chao told the US Senate that she would not give senators a timetable or a deadline for producing a new ergonomics standard.

Health and safety experts in the UK are doubtful that the US moves to redefine ergonomic injuries would have much impact here.

'The US health and safety system is based on quantitative exposure. What the ergonomic standard tried to do was introduce an objective measurement approach to preventing musculo-skeletal disorders,' said Owen Tudor, senior health and safety policy officer at the Trades Union Congress.

'The UK system is different in that it would always use ergonomics as a component of a qualitative risk assessment approach,'he added.

A Scottish court recently ruled that work-related stress and other mental injury should be dealt with in the same way as physical injury.