“They affected my stomach quite a bit,” Joan said. “Most days I worked, I would throw up in the ladies room. I didn’t throw up before I started working on the computer, and I haven’t thrown up since I quit.
“The screens weren’t at all soft on the eyes, even with the glare screens that snapped over the top. And they were nontiltable.”
She also complained that the screens were too low even for a five footer like her.
“Could I have some books and put my system on top of them so the screen will be in the middle of my eyes?” she recalls asking a supervisor. “You get this constant tension in your back because you’re always hunched over.”
“No,” she says the supervisor told her in effect, “that’s unacceptable, totally.”
“Because,” came the reply, allegedly, “the office won’t look the same. It won’t be level.”
Joan says management wouldn’t even let her work with the terminal in the middle of her desk. “They wanted them all on the same side,” she recalls. “I said, ‘Hey, I don’t work on that side of the desk, sport.’ It was ludicrous, absolutely ludicrous. Even a simple request like that was too much.”
At least the chair was adjustable “I lowered it so I could get my eyes as close to the middle of the screen as possible,” she says. “I was so low that if I opened the middle drawer on my desk I’d bang myself.”
But it was the lights that most irked Joan. They were bright fluorescents, fine for traditional paperwork but not for the computer era. Management, pressed by employees, took out many of the tubes; and yet Joan says some glare-ridden workers still wore sunglasses.
She also complains that the company wouldn’t even offer the operators eye examinations, an irony, considering that she was processing health claims.
Again, Joan was a union activist—as a result of her experiences—and some managers may recoil from the very notion of clerks organizing, and yet in her litany of complaints about working conditions, there was not one with which most ergonomics professionals would quarrel. Had management listened to her on those issues, in fact, it would have been doing itself a favor. Forcing the workers to strain their necks, backs, and eyes is hardly the road to higher productivity and profit. It would have cost several thousand dollars at the very most to change the lighting. Corporate bureaucracy may or may not have allowed the workers to be consulted in selection of the terminals, but there is no reason—other than a misdirected passion for discipline and order—why the company couldn’t have let Joan change the level of her screen.