Now she needs to wear braces on each wrist but can't always because they get in the way of preparing food and washing the dishes at Briscoe Elementary. The sacrifice was difficult, she said, because she needed the money. State and local government offices aren't covered in states like Texas where the federal government runs the OSHA program. Public workers left out With Labor Day approaching, now seems as good a time as any to call for giving public employees the same health and safety protections as private employees have. It shouldn't make any difference whether someone works in a government-owned kitchen or a privately owned kitchen, said Orell Fitzsimmons, state director of the Service Employees International Union Local 100 in Houston.
People are people, and injuries are injuries.
Attendance clerks have the worse repetitive stress problems, said Fitzsimmons, who represents some of the HISD employees. The school district puts a computer on a desk with no support for their wrists or hands because they know they're not watched by OSHA, Fitzsimmons said. They blame it on the worker. HISD spokesman Terry Abbott said he couldn't comment on the individual health problems of its employees. Charles Jeffress, assistant secretary of Labor and the head of OSHA in Washington, D.C., has called for putting government employees under the OSHA umbrella.