The furniture manufacturing industry is of vital importance to the economy of the southeastern United States. In North Carolina alone there are over 78,400 people employed by the industry ranking it second in the state's manufacturing sector employment constituting over 9 percent of the state's manufacturing workforce. Due to the manual nature of much of the work performed in these facilities, workers in this industry are exposed to many of the known risk factors for musculoskeletal disorders (excessive force, awkward postures, repetitive exertions, exposure to vibration, static work postures, etc.) The proposed research will be conducted over a three year period and our objectives are to develop and implement ergonomic controls (simple engineering controls, advanced engineering controls, and administrative controls) in a sample of furniture manufacturing companies and then to evaluate the efficacy and effectiveness of these interventions with a consideration given to the impact that worker participation plays in the acceptance/adoption of ergonomic interventions. To achieve these objectives we will 1) conduct a large-scale survey of furniture industry personnel to identify jobs/tasks of concern to the furniture manufacturing industry, 2) define the biomechanical demands of these jobs through the use of existing ergonomic and biomechanical analysis tools and a stochastic model of hazard assessment where appropriate, 3) design, develop and implement controls designed to reduce biomechanical stress and incidence of work-related musculoskeletal disorders, 4) evaluate the efficacy of these controls by comparing the following measures pre-intervention, one week post-intervention, six months post intervention and one year post-intervention: biomechanical task demands, discomfort survey data, incidence and severity rates from the OSHA Form 200 Logs, and workers compensation costs, 5) evaluate the effectiveness and feasibility of these controls through the use of industry-based surveys, and 6) evaluate the effects of participation by the workers in the design process (a form of participatory ergonomics) on the acceptance of the final ergonomic solutions.
