All Eyes on the VDT

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A desk job is supposed to be safe. No one needs a hard hat to type a memo or protective goggles to shuffle paper. But as the work force migrates from the shop floor to the corporate cubicle, millions of people face what some think may be a new health hazard -- the omnipresent video-display terminal, or VDT. * Basing their charges on a scattershot array of scientific data, union leaders claim that prolonged work in front of a computer screen can impair vision and cause headaches. Some critics say the work may even trigger miscarriages. The unions' campaign to win mandatory VDT safeguards shows every sign of becoming one of organized labor's more determined efforts of the post-industrial age. Some 19 million people, most of them women, currently work at VDTs in the U.S., a number that will more than double by the mid-1990s.

The nascent union cause scored a victory last week when legislators in Suffolk County, N.Y., enacted the first law in the U.S. to regulate VDT use in the workplace. The ordinance applies to businesses that operate more than 20 VDTs and mandates a 15-minute break every three hours for workers who use the terminals more than 26 hours a week. Employers must contribute 80% of the cost of eyeglasses and yearly eye exams; by 1990, adjustable chairs and nonglare screens will be compulsory for all new equipment.

Although business leaders decried the Suffolk ruling as misguided, at least 30 states are contemplating similar measures. Says Jan Pierce, vice president of the Communications Workers of America: "We now have some badly needed momentum to pursue the same remedy in the rest of New York, the U.S. and Canada."

Since the introduction of VDTs in the 1960s, there have been worker complaints of eyestrain, headaches, stiff necks and sore wrists. A California city worker says that after entering data into a VDT for six months, seven hours a shift, she developed migraines, temporary blindness and shoulder pains. "A lot of people don't take it seriously," she contends. "They think it's a lot of hypochondriac women complaining all the time. Those are people who don't work with computers all day." Researchers believe that some of the visual problems stem from too much glare on the screen, which can be alleviated with filters and indirect lighting.

More alarming was a June report of a survey of 1,600 women who had become pregnant since 1984. Researchers from the Kaiser-Permanente Medical Care Program in Oakland found that expectant mothers who spent 20 or more hours a week at terminals were twice as likely to suffer a miscarriage during the first trimester as non-VDT users. The difference in birth defects was not statistically significant, however. Job-related stress and poor working conditions cannot be ruled out as factors, cautions the study's director, Dr. Edmund Van Brunt, but he believes his research indicates an association between VDT use and miscarriage.