For Media
News Release
May 15, 2000
Labor expert: OSHA's ergonomics regulations based on junk science
Study recommends that OSHA cease regulating workplace ergonomics
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration's proposed workplace ergonomics regulations, slated for final approval this year, are based on bad science and should be abandoned, argues a new Cato Institute Policy Analysis by labor and employment attorney Eugene Scalia.
The ambitious new workplace ergonomics rules would regulate, among other things, the pace of work, the level of staffing, rest periods, the length of shifts and the design of equipment and facilities. But Scalia says the field of ergonomics regulation is so fraught with uncertainties about the existence and causes of so-called repetitive motion injuries that OSHA's regulatory endeavors should be abandoned.
"The premise of ergonomic regulation," Scalia writes, "is that physical exertion is hazardous and causes 'musculoskeletal disorders' such as carpal tunnel syndrome." Yet there is great medical uncertainty about this claim, which, Scalia says, is at the root of myriad problems with OSHA's desire to regulate workplace ergonomics. For example, the author found that many leading medical researchers deny that repetitive motion actually causes injury; musculoskeletal pain of the kind OSHA seeks to prevent has many obvious causes other than work; and neither ergonomists nor doctors can identify the point at which exertion ceases being benign and instead becomes a workplace hazard.
Scalia contends that OSHA's "abysmal" three-case record of ergonomics litigation is strong evidence that the agency finds regulating workplace ergonomics rather bewildering. According to his study, in the 1995 Beverly Enterprises case, "OSHA could not establish that lifting causes back injury. In . . . the 1998 Dayton Tire case, OSHA charged that nearly two dozen jobs in a single facility were hazardous but at trial could not establish the presence of a single hazard" because OSHA experts could not agree with each other's assessments of supposed job hazards. "Ultimately, their testimony was thrown out of court under the Supreme Court's 'junk science' test." Finally, in the 1997 Pepperidge Farm case, "OSHA and the world's leading ergonomists could not identify changes needed to eliminate supposed ergonomic hazards," Scalia found.
Scalia admonishes OSHA to cease its ergonomics regulations, on the grounds that in court, "the agency could not determine what if anything was wrong, or how to correct it." Employers, he advises, "should not be commanded to make scientific determinations that consistently have eluded OSHA."
"OSHA’s Ergonomics Litigation Record:
Three Strikes and It’s Out"
| Index of News Releases | Cato Institute Home |
© 1999 The Cato Institute