The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) should take steps to better identify and address ergonomic hazards at warehouse and delivery companies, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) concluded in a recent report.
The transportation and warehousing sector, which includes e-commerce warehouses and “last-mile” consumer delivery, had the highest serious injury and illness rate of all 19 employment sectors in 2022—an estimated 3.8 cases per 100 workers—according to Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data cited by the GAO. It identified “overexertion and bodily reaction,” which can cause musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs) like tendonitis or back pain, as the most common hazard in warehouses and delivery.
The GAO gave OSHA five recommendations, including the following:
- The agency should ensure its compliance safety and health officers (CSHO) have information about MSDs that have occurred when they conduct workplace inspections. To capture such data, OSHA could add a column for musculoskeletal injuries to its recordkeeping and reporting forms.
- The agency should ensure its CSHOs are trained to identify and assess ergonomic hazards during inspections under OSHA’s warehouse and distribution center National Emphasis Program (NEP). Training could include new courses or ergonomic modules added to existing training courses.
- OSHA should update its internal guidance for agency personnel and publicly available guidance for employers to cover identifying, assessing, and addressing ergonomic hazards.
- OSHA should conduct timely follow-ups to ergonomic hazard alert letters. Agency area offices sometimes issue hazard alert letters in addition to or instead of citations. Hazard alert letters carry no monetary penalties.
- Finally, the agency should evaluate how well its NEP helps CSHOs identify, assess, and address ergonomic hazards in warehouses and distribution centers, then determine and document “next steps” in correcting deficiencies.
In OSHA’s response to the GAO’s recommendations, the agency said some suggestions may not be practical due to resource constraints. It explained that adding an MSD column to its injury and illness recordkeeping forms remains on its long-term regulatory agenda. However, the steps necessary to add such a column would divert agency resources from other regulatory priorities.
The agency disagreed with the suggestion that it develop industry-specific guidance on ergonomic hazards, explaining that it only issues industry-specific guidance for industry-unique hazards.
To conduct its review, GAO staff analyzed BLS data from 2015 to 2022 and OSHA inspection data. It also interviewed agency headquarters officials and compliance officers and managers at six area offices, as well as surveyed workers and interviewed 15 stakeholder groups and five employers.
In its review, the GAO examined productivity technology used in the industry that may help protect workers from ergonomic hazards and technology or may have unintended safety consequences. Technology in warehouses includes headsets that give order pickers voice commands directing them to a product’s location, mobile robots and automated vehicles, hand-held scanning devices, and wearable monitoring devices. Delivery vans may have inward- and outward-facing cameras that monitor driver activity.
A stakeholder acknowledged to GAO interviewers that workers may feel unsafe because they must keep pace with the machines at warehouses and have fewer opportunities for informal breaks.