USPS Injuries Down But Problems Still Exist With DBCS Machines
Federal Times reports: ”The U.S. Postal Service is steadily becoming a safer place to work. (note: links below added by PostalReporter.com)
Last year, slightly fewer than 64,200 injuries were reported by Postal Service workers, down from 71,433 in 2004 and 79,514 in 2003.
Workers’ compensation payments for 2005 injuries also fell to about $60 million, about half the amount of payments for new injuries of the previous year, and down to a level not seen since 2003, according to Labor Department statistics.
The change is due to several programs and improvements the agency has initiated in the past several years, according to Henderson.
Problems with bar-code sorter
For all their recent efforts, however, the Postal Service appears frustrated by one mail-sorting machine it introduced in the early 1990s and which, at least according to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), poses a risk of injury to those operating it.
After a three-year investigation into the Postal Service’s Ergonomic Risk Reduction Process program, NIOSH reported in May that its Delivery Bar Code Sorter (DBCS), which is capable of sorting letter mail of all sizes, “posed the same or greater risk of injury to workers” as the machine it had replaced.
The author of the report told Federal Times that the latest DBCS, as the sorter is known, is worse than the older sorter because it requires those who operate it to reach higher and bend lower when feeding mail into the machine or “sweeping” it out.
The best answer to the problems posed by DBCS is to automate the “sweeping” function, which requires employees to manually move mail from the tiers of stackers in the DBCS to trays opposite the stackers, said Loyd Reeder, a clerk at the Denver Processing and Distribution Center, where the NIOSH examination was conducted. “The Postal Service has spent millions on the machines and it is committed to its use,” said Reeder, a frequent blogger on the DBCS topic. “So what should be done now is follow the recommendations that NIOSH has made for the machines’ use.”
May 6th, 2007 at 5:19 pm
This is in response to the Federal Times article which was posted on Postal Reporter on 9-25-06. At the very least this article will get the word out to the membership that the US Dept of Health-NIOSH states that short of a redesign of the sweep side of the DBCS the most effective methodology for clerks to avoid injury on the DBCS is to slow down the pace of work and run less mail through the machine. I do not recall saying to the author, Dan Davidson, that the best solution to the terrible design of the DBCS is to automate the sweeping function. However, I am sure the postal service WILL AUTOMATE the DBCS and eliminate human operators just as soon as it is technically and financially viable. They will do this regardless of what NIOSH or anyone else says. In the meantime the human operators of the DBCS should follow NIOSH requirements. The first part of the article was full of allot of selfcongatulatory hoopla from the USPS about their supposed injury reductions. As I have said before, these are reported injuries, NOT ACTUAL injuries. Who is to say that some of this supposed “reduction” is because a number of clerks have wised up and are slowing down the pace of work on the DBCS, a significant injury producer. If you have any questions you may reach me at loydreeder@earthlink.net