Ergonomics

Trying to keep alive efforts to fight widespread repetitive motion injuries, unions and other job safety advocates have decided to support a stripped-down ergonomics standard being considered by California officials. The qualified backing from organized labor marks progress toward adoption of a standard that--even in its current narrowed form--would be the nation's first comprehensive regulation to prevent injuries stemming from repetitive job tasks.

Nissan nails unconventional. One has only to spend some time driving the all-electric Leaf, the spunky Juke crossover or the anomalous Murano CrossCabriolet to know this is a company that takes risks -- and succeeds from them. So one would think such a forward-thinking carmaker would have no trouble bringing innovation and appeal to the table when it came time to redo something as blase as a minivan. Nope. The Nissan Quest returns to the U.S. for 2011 after a yearlong hiatus.

Officials of the California Occupational Safety and Health Standards Board predicted Friday that by April they would adopt a revised program to protect workers against repetitive motion injuries. Their comments downplayed concerns raised by Thursday's surprise rejection by the California Office of Administrative Law of an ergonomics standard previously adopted by the standards board.

In what may be the first action of its kind, California workplace safety regulators have charged that the duties performed by housekeepers at a hotel -- scrubbing, bed making, vacuuming -- violate the state's repetitive-motion rules. A citation issued late last month by the Division of Occupational Safety and Health identified eight infractions at the Hilton Los Angeles Airport hotel.

Re "A First for Workplace Safety," editorial, Nov. 18: Your editorial praising state regulators for a "breakthrough" when they imposed the nation's first ergonomics standard should, instead, be mourning the loss of jobs and business Californians will suffer should this rule actually take effect. The regulation is so ridiculous and costly that the trucking industry is going to court to stop it. There is a complete lack of consensus among the experts as to how many repetitive movements, and what kind, result in so-called repetitive stress injuries--or why the frequency of such injuries varies so greatly among similar people doing identical jobs.

California is considering whether to adopt the nation's first statewide standard for workplace ergonomics--a set of rules that would require all employers to take steps to safeguard their workers against "repetitive-motion illness" caused by everything from video-display terminals to jackhammers.

A week after it canceled workplace safety rules, Congress is preparing to tell the Bush administration to rewrite them in a way that will please business lobbyists. Sen. John B. Breaux (D-La.) has offered a proposal to require the Labor Department's Occupational Safety and Health Administration to issue revised rules to protect workers from repetitive motion injuries within two years.

So here we were at the office, your plucky squadron of Times editorial employees, pretending to be working on newspaper stories while actually writing the Great American Novel without the boss finding out, when the message flashed across the top of our computer screens: Stand up, stretch your neck and breathe deeply. Huh? Who said that? Come on, what's the gag? I knocked the message off the screen and got back to the task of writing the nov--I mean, the column.

President Bush on Tuesday signed a bill repealing new workplace safety regulations, saying they posed "overwhelming compliance challenges" for businesses. The measure, revoking rules issued late in the Clinton administration, was the first substantive policy Bush signed into law.

In an action expected to slow national efforts to combat rapidly spreading workplace injuries such as carpal tunnel syndrome, California's occupational safety standards board Thursday rejected what would have been the country's first comprehensive ergonomics program. The 6-0 vote against the regulations surprised even some of the proposal's ardent critics.

The tendinitis in Mike Estrada's right arm was getting worse. He couldn't write up work orders for his construction company, carry a briefcase or even staple together papers. But although the pain was aggravated by the repetitive stresses of his job, the ergonomic changes -- getting a new office chair, using a track ball instead of a mouse -- didn't help. Finally, he sought help from doctors at USC. They prescribed not additional work changes, but painkillers and -- exercise.

Is the Motorola Q phone a BlackBerry killer? Or just a pretty face? The Q, which went on sale Wednesday from Verizon Wireless for about $200, has a full-sized keyboard for composing e-mail and text messages. So does Research in Motion's BlackBerry phone, which has become a fixture of business culture. The Q has a bright, color screen. Ditto the comparably priced, newer BlackBerry models. And both have the ability to receive e-mail on the fly. So, what's that different about the Q?

Take a quick glance at Hewlett-Packard Co.'s new smart phone -- the iPaq hw6515 -- and you might think you've seen it before. With its miniature qwerty keyboard, touch screen and five-way navigation button on the front, the iPaq -- available starting this week -- looks a lot like Palm Inc.'s popular Treo 650. In addition to their similar designs, each can be used -- with varying degrees of success -- as a phone, address book, appointment calendar, e-mailer, Web surfer, camera and video player.

For nearly a decade, Kwei Fong Lin tolerated numbness in her forearms. Like a great many Chinese immigrants who work in this city's cramped and poorly equipped garment factories, her neck and back ached from long days spent hunched over a sewing machine while perched on rickety folding chairs, stools or even crates. "We just took the pain as it came," the 52-year-old Hong Kong native said in Cantonese. But an unlikely revolution has taken root here.

The assignment, the boss insisted, was simple: Undergo an "ergonomics awakening." So off we set to Northwestern University, where Fred Lupton, a Ford Motor Co. ergonomics engineer, was spending the day sharing his knowledge with budding engineers. Ford's ergonomics engineers must ensure that features and systems on new vehicles are easy to use.

Alphonse Chapanis, a professor of psychological and brain sciences at Johns Hopkins University who pioneered the field of ergonomics, has died. He was 85. Chapanis, who lived in suburban Towson, Md., died Oct. 4 in a Baltimore hospital of complications following knee surgery. Long before the term ergonomics became commonplace with the proliferation of computers in the workplace, Chapanis began his research in what was formerly called human engineering.

The Clinton Administration, bowing to pressure from business interests and congressional Republicans, signaled a further retreat Monday in its plans to battle carpal tunnel syndrome and other painful workplace injuries stemming from repetitive activities.

Prevention programs in the workplace can reduce the incidence of musculoskeletal disorders such as carpal tunnel syndrome and lower back strain, but more research is needed to understand what kinds of programs work, a U.S. government advisory panel said.

BUNKER IN THE HILL * Architect Brian Murphy describes the Thousand Oaks home office he designed for a lawyer as ''a 10-inch-thick concrete shoebox buried into the hillside.'' But the ''shoebox'' is anything but ordinary. The 42-by-15-foot bunker-style structure sits across a small pond inhabited by bass, crayfish, frogs and turtles from a striking split-level modern home designed by Frank Gehry in the late 1980s.