WRULD DB-Plaintiff: Sharon Anne Summers

Case	Task	Injury	Date	Court	Judgment for
Summers - v - Justica Cas Limited	Keyboard use: adding machine	Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, Occupational Cramp	11 Sep 1997	Birmingham County	Defendant

The Plaintiff started her employment with the Defendant straight from school at the age of 17 and worked continuously from 1985 through to May 1991. Her initial employment was as a clerk, but in October 1989 at the age of 21 she was promoted to the position of supervisor. The Defendant's business was that of debt collecting on a nationwide scale. They employed field collectors who were organised on an area basis, collecting weekly sums from the debtors. These agents completed weekly analysis sheets. The major part of Miss Summers' working day was spent adding the individual amounts shown on the analysis sheet with the aid of an adding machine. She said that the used all four fingers of her right hand on the adding machine.

The analysis sheets would come in a batch, each agent contributing a number of sheets in his weekly returns. Miss Summers sat on a typist's chair at a desk with an adding machine in front of her on the desk. It was her job to get the envelopes which came in en masse, from a pile somewhere in the office, to extract the analysis sheets, and to do the entering in and adding up of the amounts on her machine. She also had certain other responsibilities, particularly after she became a supervisor. But it is common ground that before and after October 1989 at least 75%-80% of her working day would be spent on her adding machine.

There was a deadline for processing all the weekly action sheets, which was 11 o'clock on Friday morning, and that involved considerably more activity towards the end of the week with lunchtime overtime being done by her on a very regular basis on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. Miss Summers worked with the adding machine each morning from 8.30 until 1 o'clock. After lunch she would do other jobs which did not involve keying in figures including, balancing cheques, writing in certain totals in a logbook, entering details of bounced cheques in a computer, checking counterfoils against banking returns, but from 3 o'clock or so in the afternoon she reverted to the adding machine work. On occasions she did overtime after 4.30 and also did regular evening work.

As supervisor, she continued to work with the adding machine for the greater part of the day but she did have other additional responsibilities, such as distributing the activity reports, preparing cheques for distribution to the field agents, filling in details on computer print-outs, and things of that kind. The Plaintiff's work increased after October 1989. She was frequently doing as much as 30 or 40 hours overtime a month and, in addition, she did evening work at a different location but for the same employer in what is called the key to disk department. That evening work averaged about 40 hours but on occasions it was as much as 82 hours in a single month. However, no complaint was made in respect of that work. The Plaintiff was considered a hard-working and conscientious employee.

The Plaintiff's evidence was that in late 1988 or early 1989 she first had symptoms of discomfort which she described as pain in the right shoulder. As time went by, that pain became more frequent, stronger and lasting longer, and she went to see her general practitioner in April 1991. He gave her a medical note for two weeks off sick. She then returned to work but only for a very short space of time, her last day at work with the Defendant being 20th May 1991. The Plaintiff claimed damages for Carpal Tunnel Syndrome and Writer's Cramp.

In the opening paragraphs of his Judgment, Mr Recorder Barnes identified four major issues he needed to decide: firstly, whether the allegations of negligence were established; secondly whether, assuming they were established, they gave rise to a foreseeable risk of injury; thirdly, whether the injuries complained of were established on the evidence and, fourthly, if so, whether those injuries were caused by the conditions in which Miss Summers worked during the course of her employment with the Defendant.

The Plaintiff's allegations of negligence focused on three main issues: the intensity of her work; the excessive periods of continuous activity; and the posture she adopted, due in part to an allegedly defective chair.

Mr Recorder Barnes found that during the last five months she was at work the Plaintiff would not in an average week have been performing more than 5,000 key depressions per hour with her right hand, the most likely figure in his judgment was 4,000 to 4,500. He concluded that it was "quite impossible" for any criticism legitimately to be made of the employer for imposing a workload of that kind upon her.

As to the complaint of a continuous working pattern of three to four and a half hours, Mr Recorder Barnes did not accept that that was excessive. There was no evidence before him on which he could find that working for four hours continuously was in itself something that a reasonably careful employer should preclude in his office staff. Nor did he accept that working a 40 hour week, often with 10 hours of overtime, gave rise to any legitimate criticism of the employers. The Plaintiff's decision to do evening work was entirely a matter for her.

As to the complaints based on posture and position and the working arrangements, Mr Recorder Barnes was not satisfied there was any defect to the chair and did not accept that the Defendant had a further duty to design or enforce a lay-out of an office desk indicating where an adding machine should be put, or how far in a chair should be pulled up, or whether an operator should sit up straight or lean forward. In his judgment, it was excessive to impose a duty of that kind on an employer, and an office worker could reasonably be expected to make her own judgment on that.

With respect to foreseeability, Mr Recorder Barnes was not persuaded that in the climate of opinion in the period 1989 to 1991 the Defendant should have foreseen a risk of injury from adverse working conditions with a keyboard operator. Mr Recorder Barnes went on to quote from the report of the Ergonomics Expert instructed on behalf to the Defendant who had suggested that from about 1985 onwards it was widely appreciated that particularly high risks were run by operators whose work involved intense keyboard activity, and that equipment constraints on posture were associated with increased risks. Mr Recorder Barnes then says:

That is the view of an expert in these matters, but neither of the Health & Safety Executive reports refer to that problem. It does not appear that any complaints were ever addressed to management about the VDU or the key input factor, and I do not find that it was foreseeable at the time with which I am concerned that the employer should have foreseen a risk of injury. What might have been foreseen by an expert would not necessarily have been reasonably foreseen by an employer.

Having reviewed the extensive medical evidence, Mr Recorder Barnes says:

I am not satisfied that she suffers from carpal tunnel syndrome and, if she did, I am not satisfied that it was caused by the working conditions. As to writer's cramp, I am now satisfied that she suffers from it today but I am quite satisfied that it was not caused by her conditions of work. There is no need for me, it seems, to grapple with the issue as to whether writer's cramp is itself of organic or non-organic etiology, bearing in mind my conclusion that the causation link is not established.

This robust Judgment in favour of the Defendant can be contrasted with others from around the same time, and later, in which Defendants were found negligent and/or in breach of the Health and Safety (Display Screen Equipment) Regulations in claims for upper limb disorders associated with numeric data entry, e.g. Conaty v Barclays Bank plc.

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Last updated: 16/10/2009