"Heave-ho" To Heavy Lifting

A heightened watchdog mentality adds to the immediacy of material handling issues. E.A.S.E. warns that OSHA has recently cited ergonomic violations as "willful," under the Workplace Safety Act.

Employers must be taking these statistics seriously, because according to Barbara Webster, a researcher at Liberty Mutual Research Center for Safety and Health, the frequency of material handling injuries has stabilized in recent years. Several soon-to-be released studies actually show a decline in claims for back injuries, she notes. One contributor to this trend could be Early-Return-to-Work programs, which aim to curtail the average duration of disability.