Something missing from NIOSH-Toyota agreement??

[Omaha Steve]

http://thepumphandle.wordpress.com/2010/01/15/something-missing-from-niosh-toyota-agreement/

January 15, 2010 in Confined Space @ TPH, Occupational Health & Safety, Research | by The Pump Handle

Last month, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with Toyota Motors’ Department of Environmental and Safety Engineering, pledging to:

“to improve the assessment, management, analysis, and control of workplace conditions related to the safety and health of employees.”

The news release suggests this is a two-party agreement, not the tripartite labor-managment-goverment model we expect for health and safety projects. It’s hard to imagine how the goals of the MOU can be accomplished successfully without on-par involvement of workers.

Nancy Lessin of the United Steelworkers’ Tony Mazzocchi Center for Health, Safety and Environmental Education offers us her perspective below on this new NIOSH-Toyota partnership.

The pairing of NIOSH and Toyota to collaborate on research to improve workplace health and safety and identify best practices (without the participation of the workforce, mind you), tackling such things as ergonomics and comprehensive worksite programs, conjures up the image of absurd pairings such as the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and Bernie Madoff teaming up to fix financial institutions, or more topically, the insurance industry teaming up with Congress to fix the nation’s health care system.

The Toyota Production System, developed in post-World War II Japan, has been hailed world-wide as a “miracle” system that advances productivity, quality and efficiency. It has been adopted by industries throughout manufacturing, and has now entered construction, health care and many other sectors of the economy, often under the name “lean manufacturing”, “lean production” or just plain “lean.” Lean is about doing more with less, getting rid of “waste” and anything that doesn’t “add value” to the product or service. It is important to understand what this means from an occupational safety and health standpoint, where lean is unveiled as something else: management by stress.

A core element in lean is what is known as “kaizen” or “continuous improvement.” Unfortunately, “continuous improvement” does not mean continuously improving workers’ wages, benefits, health and safety or other working conditions. In reality it means pushing workers to work harder and faster (forget the “work smarter, not harder” myth). This is accomplished by removing the micro-breaks where muscles, tendons and nerves get the kind of momentary down-time that serves to prevent musculoskeletal injuries; and removing workers themselves, in a race with no finish line.

Across the nation, workers and local unions identify “doing more with less” (increased workloads, job combinations, increased pace of work, extended working hours, fewer workers) as a major cause of workplace injury, illness and death. For this, we can thank “lean” and the Toyota Production System. And in Japan, thanks to the Toyota Production System, there are now two compensable occupational diseases not yet compensable in other nations’ workers compensation systems: karoshi (death from overwork) and karo jisatsu (suicide from overwork).

FULL story at link.

[OneTenthofOnePercent]

1. We have kaizen meetings all the time to hone our processes.

Overall they seem to pretty helpful, but often I feel the effort and cost to implement the cost saving measures eclipses the actual savings. I think we have an entire work team here devoted to kaizen plannening and execution. that way engineers and workers can focus on working and the kaizen people worry about changes and processes.