A Harder Sell
"We believe there's only a 50 percent, at best, compliance with prescription eyewear programs in manufacturing facilities."
Editor's note: Broad changes in the U.S. manufacturing sector and within the safety industry have made it more difficult to sell prescription safety glasses to employees, who collectively pay an increasing percentage of the glasses' cost, say Titmus Optical, Inc.'s Mike Franz, senior marketing/product manager, protective products, and Joe Parsons, director of sales. Titmus, an ISO 9001:2000 certified manufacturer of vision screening equipment and a leading supplier of premium prescription safety eyeglass frames (www.titmus.com), is based in Petersburg, Va. Franz and Parsons discussed these trends Dec. 2, 2005, with Occupational Health & Safety's editor. Excerpts from the conversation follow:
Let's talk about today's workplaces and vision hazards. Are there new hazards out there, or are safety managers and employees mainly facing familiar threats?
Joe Parsons: I really don't think in the general workplace there have been a lot of changes, like we might expect with first responders in the terror arena, where they're looking at biohazards and things like that. In the general manufacturing workplace, I don't think that the hazards have changed that much. We're still looking at dust and flying particles and objects that might be propelled from lathes or whatever it may be.
Nothing is much different, either, in terms of what those dusts and materials consist of?
Parsons: Not a lot. There are some new rare metals that are being used in metallurgy today, but generally it's not significantly different from what we've seen in the past.
Are the protective products available to workers these days any different or better at protecting against these hazards?
Parsons: That's something we've been working on a great deal and have some new products coming to market. I think for the past 20 years--I started in the business in '78--and I think for the last decade or so, we really swung to the fashion side of protective eyewear.
We tried to get it to where it was cosmetically and aesthetically nice to wear, but I don't know that we did a lot of things to improve necessarily the protection aspect, especially on prescription eyewear. As trends got smaller in dress eyewear, we got smaller in safety glasses.
Right.
Parsons: But what has been the situation in the last three to five years--and this could be economically driven--companies are no longer as concerned about aesthetics . . . but have swung back now [to] protection. More protective than what we've been in the past seems to be an issue. We, like many other companies, are really looking at protecting the eye cavity and doing things differently than we've done in the past eight to 10 years or so.
That's interesting. I know the pendulum swung significantly toward style. I'm not surprised this change is happening, but I wasn't aware it was happening.
Mike Franz: If you go back to the ANSI standard of 1968, it was a design standard. Safety prescription eyewear had to meet design criteria. Each time the standard is updated, OSHA expects ANSI to increase the stringency of what those protective devices are able to accomplish.
In 1989, the standard became a performance standard. That is, design was left to the manufacturer's responsibility, but whatever resulted had to pass these tough performance tests. That was a huge, major, watershed event in terms of how we as manufacturers looked at the product. Frankly, it allowed us to continue going more toward a fashionable product, but one which has a high level of performance. Because if you go back to the late '70s and early '80s, compliance by the factory worker was a huge issue because the product was unsightly. When we started going toward a more fashionable look, what that did was increase compliance a great deal among the workers where programs were present.
As we return to the idea that products should be more protective, what goes into that? A different material? A different thickness or size of the product?
Parsons: I'll tell you what has driven this. We've had two issues that seem to have really come to the front in the last year or two. [One is] dust particles. There's not the major, high-impact type of injuries that happen. It seems people are more having particles come from the top or the side. A lot of times, what we're found is, a guy can wear a hard hat and wear safety glasses. And when he goes to take off his hard hat, there have been particles that have been underneath the hard hat, he takes it off, and they come down behind his safety glasses and get into his eye. It may just be a small particulate that has gotten into the guy's eye, but he ends up going to the emergency room or whatever to have this thing removed and flushed out, and it ends up being a reported injury.
This article originally appeared in the February 2006 issue of Occupational Health & Safety.