Companies Face Litigation
The Age
Monday May 9, 1994
Hundreds of injured keyboard users have filed law suits against big computer companies, claiming that the companies sold unsafe equipment. Kylie Pope reports.
ONE of the biggest batches of product-liability lawsuits since asbestos is threatening to smudge the squeaky-clean image of the computer industry.
Next month, trials are expected to begin in Rhode Island, New York, and California in the first of more than 2000 lawsuits filed by computer-keyboard users against some of the nation's best-known high- tech names.
IBM, Eastman Kodak, AT&T and others are accused of selling keyboards that users blame for painful, even crippling, hand and wrist injuries.
The companies deny any link between keyboards and injuries, and even plaintiffs' attorneys concede that evidence of such a link will be tough to prove. But these attorneys say that there is mounting evidence that keyboard makers trained their own employees to avoid injuries while offering no warning to customers.
Documents uncovered by law firms in New York and California indicate that some of the keyboard makers knew for years about injury complaints tied to their products, in part because of a flurry of workers' compensation claims filed by the companies' own employees. In response, the documents show, the companies established internal training to prevent injuries.
The question of warnings so far has been aimed mostly a IBM and Atex.
The keyboard companies decline to comment because of the litigation.
The cases are far from a sure thing for plaintiffs. An early case in Houston was decided in Compaq Computer's favour primarily on the basis of scientific and medical issues, though the jury also found that Compaq didn't know its computers could cause injury and so wasn't obligated to warn its users.
And experts say that even if plaintiffs can nail down the warning issue, it dosn't resolve a more fundamental question: Where is the scientific proof that an individual's injuries were caused by keyboards rather than stress or outside activities? In the United Kingdom, a judge last year threw out a keyboard-injury lawsuit filed by a Reuters Holdings news reporter after deciding that the journalist's problem was not related to the computer.
Steven Phillips, a New York attorney spearheading the litigation and the other plaintiffs' attorneys acknowledge that studies linking computer keyboards with wrist injuries are controversial. But they insist there is considerable circumstantial evidence not the least of which is the increase in so-called repetitive stress injury complaints since personal compuers came into vogue.
Documents show that as early as 1984, IBM employees in Australia reported suffering from a bevy of RSI injuries. That year, the workers lodged 591 lost work hours because of the injuries.
A year later IBM began giving 30,000 of its US managers training for correct keyboard usage. Similarly at Kodak, whose former Atex unit once dominated the market for publishing industry keyboards, a company expert , William H. Cushman, suggested that people who use its machines also use wrist rests and adjustable chairs.
Cushman also recommended that Atex provide its customrs with training materials dealing with ways to prevent strain injuries. The users who are suing the company say they never saw any of the materials.
The frustration of the keyboard users is evident in a 1992 letter to Atex from Stanley Kaplan, systems director for the `New York Times'.
Dozens of `Times' reporters had begun to complain of wrist problems after the instalation of the Atex system, and, Kaplan notes, even Max Frankel, the paper's executive editor, was wearing a wrist brace.
Kaplan says he was told by an Atex attorney that an alternative, safer keyboard had been developed by Atex but kept from users and even Atex's own sales force because of fears about litigation. Wall Street Journal
© 1994 The Age
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