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LEARNING IN ACTION: A worker utilizes a computer training program to evaluate proper safety procedures in Unified Western Grocers’ Transitional Duty Room.

REPORT CARD: A Select employee and a warehouse worker review an audit of the worker's safety techniques.

Five years ago, Unified Western Gro-cers, the largest grocery wholesaler in the western United States, needed help in reducing the number of employee injuries it was seeing in its warehouse.

The company, which has 1 million square feet of warehouse space and more than 390 employees, had begun to see the rising costs associated with employee injury as an issue it needed to deal with. Unified turned to Select Inc. for guidance.

Seattle-based Select is a human resource consulting and risk management firm that has been helping warehouses keep employee injury levels to a minimum, as well as working with them to contain the costs associated with on-the-job injuries.

"We brought them in to run our Transi-tional Duty Room (TDR)," notes Cary Gable, director of the Northwest region, for Unified. The company's Transitional Duty Room is a separate location, within the facility, that Unified runs its new hire training and employee retraining programs out of. Employees who have been placed on work restriction report there every day, until they can be transitioned back into Unified's normal work force.

Like most companies, Unified assigns the standard light duty work assignments for its injured workers. "We might have them do cycle counts," Gable says. "We might have them painting ballards." (Those ever-present yellow cement bumpers you see in a warehouse.)