ERGONOMIC PLANS STAY ON SHELF : OSHA STANDS BY AS STRESS INJURIES RISE.

Byline: Steve Lohr The New York Times

In his Manhattan office, Dr. Emil Pascarelli leafed through the files of a day's worth of patients: a computer programmer, a television producer, a systems engineer, a magazine editor, a help-desk worker at a telephone company and a couple of others.

They came to Pascarelli with severe pain and weakness in the arms and hands. For them, the simple task of gripping a pen or a telephone can be a challenge, making work excruciating or impossible.

They are casualties of the information age. Their ailments are related to heavy use of computer keyboards, but the precise nature of the cause-and-effect linkage is uncertain, and is a subject of debate among physicians and researchers.

Yet what is beyond dispute is that the reported number of cases of repetitive stress injuries continues to rise, up 80 percent since 1990, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, affecting hundreds of thousands of American workers.

``Those of us on the front lines just see this problem mounting,'' said Pascarelli, a professor of occupational medicine at Columbia University whose patients also include a number of musicians.

The government has been stymied. Bowing to fierce opposition from conservative Republicans and corporate lobbyists, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration last year backed off its drive to establish rules for ergonomics in the workplace. Ergonomics is a discipline intended to design jobs and tools to fit the physical and psychological limits of workers.

After the agency's effort went nowhere, Pascarelli and three other physicians came up with what they thought was a useful suggestion. They proposed the formation of a group, to be sponsored by the federal government, that would coordinate research on repetitive stress injuries, publicize prevention measures and recommend voluntary ergonomic guidelines for business.

When told of the physicians' proposal, proponents and opponents of the original OSHA initiative said the idea of forming the group seemed to be a sensible compromise that at least warranted consideration.

But since it was presented to Labor Secretary Robert B. Reich last fall, the proposal has been ignored.

Labor Department officials say that the push for budget cuts by conservative Republicans and restrictions on OSHA are to blame.

Yet Rep. Henry Bonilla, R-Texas, who opposed the OSHA rule-making effort and has called the agency ``a big labor-driven, adversarial group,'' said: ``If there's a respected group of experts pushing for education and voluntary standards, it sounds like a good idea. And it's a little surprising to me that OSHA would reject a seemingly reasonable proposal out of hand.''

The National Coalition on Ergonomics, which consists of 300 corporate members and trade groups, led the lobbying campaign that thwarted OSHA's effort to set ergonomic standards. The coalition's position is that the agency's effort was too ambitious, covering millions of workers, from meat cutters to truck loaders to computer programmers. The coalition also contends that research on repetitive stress injuries points to many possible causes, and thus does not justify an industrywide standard.

In a study sponsored by the coalition, Dr. Howard M. Sandler, an expert in occupational medicine, asserted in January that OSHA's research on ergonomics had been biased and did not support a broad, government-mandated standard.

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Photo: Some computer makers have developed keyboards intend ed to reduce repetitive stress injuries, but efforts to establish government ergonomic standards for the workplace have been stymied.

The New York Times