Load at Work

What Work Asks People to Absorb

De: David S Morgan

Narrado por: Virtual Voice

The citation came under the General Duty Clause.

That is the clause OSHA reaches for when no specific standard covers the hazard and the hazard is obvious anyway. In our case they did not have to look far. They made the argument out of our own records.

I was hired as Director of Industrial, Facilities, and Safety Engineering to abate it. I was also hired to improve productivity. Both mandates arrived in the same conversation.

What I found was a company that could construct a labor standard from published tables, apply it across five different systems, and pay a bonus against it. We knew how long a motion should take. We knew how much production it should generate. We knew how to reward somebody for performing it faster.

What we had not built was an equally disciplined way to measure what that motion was accumulating in the person.

That gap was not a detail. It was the whole of OSHA's case, and it was correct.

What we built, and what it found

An index from evidence four departments were already collecting. Ergonomic analysis and work measurement read together. Job-level risk placed inside the shop floor control system rather than beside it, so a group leader could see it at a quarter to six with a marker in his hand. And then a control chart, on a person, of the kind that had been running on the coating line for years and had never once been pointed at a human being.

The first line it flagged belonged to the best operator in the department.

Not a poor performer. A woman who ran three machines, held the strongest rates on the floor, earned the largest incentive in her department, and had eliminated her own recovery by being good enough to fill the pauses.

When I proposed taking a machine off her, she asked the question this book turns on.

"If you take a machine off me, does the money come with it?"

What this is not

It will not tell you to be more resilient. It will not tell you the answer is less work. It will not treat measurement as surveillance, and it is not a wellness book. It will not give you a safe number, because we were asked for one repeatedly and refused.

Nobody in this account is careless. The assessments are accurate. The rotation is documented. The incentive works. The supervisors are competent. The automation genuinely removes dangerous lifting. And people absorb the unresolved remainder anyway.

Twenty-three short chapters, six or seven minutes each. One investment casting operation. And a question that runs through all of it: what is the system making people absorb?

Part of The At Work Series from Horizon Echo Publishing. Each volume explores one human capacity organizations cannot afford to lose. Begin anywhere.