One of the few issues on which supermarket management and organized labor will readily agree is that the task of scanning groceries at the checkout stand has gotten considerably safer in the past 15 or so years.
redesigned the checkstand."
When scanning was introduced, there was a significant increase in repetitive strain injuries among cashiers, she noted. "But supermarkets started redoing checkstands in the late 1980s, early 1990s," she said. "Pretty much, you go out there and you see good designs. By and large, they have incorporated things like lowering the scales, having the laser read more of the package, narrowing the width of the conveyor belt, making everything adjustable."
Still, Nowell observed that two problems can crop up. One occurs when the scanner must unload the shopping cart. "Checker unload is dreadful in every way," she said. "Usually, it's not a very good design, so the cashier has got to bend and twist and lean and all sorts of things to get the items out of the cart, scan them and then bag them. It's a terrible idea."
The other problem arises when the scanner is also the bagger, according to Nowell. "Without a bagger most of these checkstands don't work very well. They're really designed for a scanner who has a bagger. Lots of time, the problem is getting the bag back to the customer. There are these long reaches from the bag well over the counter and into the cart."
These warm-and-fuzzy labor-management feelings do not carry over to distribution centers.
Commented Nowell, "Warehouse work is notorious. They have one of the highest back injury rates of any job out there. They're blowing their backs out quicker than quick."
Dr. Tom Waters, chief of the human factors and ergonomics research section at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, Cincinnati, led two studies of supermarket distribution centers in the early 1990s. "What we found were very high-risk jobs," he told SN. NIOSH is part of the Centers for Disease Control, Atlanta, which in turn is part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Partially because of limited resources -- "We are a very small agency with a very large and diverse mission," he explained -- Waters has not been back to see if any of the recommendations he made in his reports have been implemented. "It would be great to go back. My understanding is that nothing has changed," he said.
However, Jim Koskan, corporate director of risk management, Supervalu, Minneapolis, said food retail distribution has made great strides in improving working conditions. "Distribution centers in general have become more expert in designing their warehouse to actually reduce ms [musculoskeletal] strain on the individual while at the same time increasing output of the individual," he said.
Observed NIOSH's Waters, "There's a lot that can be done. The industry needs to work with us to solve these problems. There isn't a quick fix. If industry would work with us I think we could solve a lot of their problems and they wouldn't go out of business. We're willing to work with the industry if they're willing to work with us."
