“We want all Ohio workers to go home safely from their jobs every night,” BWC Administrator and CEO Sarah Morrison said.
The state has awarded more than $45 million to companies in the past three years for workplace safety and health improvement, she said, which has led to a more than 60 percent reduction in injury claims.
Carmichael, a division of the McGregor Metalworking Companies, produces steel components for agricultural, automotive and industrial tools, Plant Manager Andrew Brougher said.
Workers at the plant often use machinery that required them to bend over and lift baskets of steel parts that weighed between 25 to 30 pounds, Brougher said.
“It was a very worker-intense loading and unloading system,” he said.
The bending-over movement was close to 100 times per day per worker.
Many injuries in the manufacturing business are from repetitive movements involving heavy lifting, Morrison said.
The company applied for state money to design lifting equipment that would make it so workers eliminate the strain of bending over for the baskets from their work flow.
“They didn’t just buy something off the shelf,” to fix their workers’ safety problem, Morrison said.
Carmichael plant managers worked with people from the BWC hygiene and safety division to design equipment for the shop floor, Morrison said, for a customized solution to their heavy-lifting problems.
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