Ergonomics for Home-Based Workers: Use Your Brain to Save Your Body

by Marilyn Ekdahl Ravicz

Overview

We all work at home--even if we aren't telecommuters, entrepreneurs or stay-at-home parents. Whether we're paying the bills, helping children with homework, or operating a home-based business, time at home often requires us to spend hours at home workstations. Most of the time, we don't realize we're using our equipment in unhealthy ways.
Fortunately, you can reduce the wear and tear on your body by learning about ergonomics. In this guidebook, a longtime medical anthropologist shares tips and strategies that enable you to
develop habits to work efficiently and comfortably;
conserve your energy and work smarter; and
use your brain in order to save your body.
By tweaking your environment and the ways you use office equipment, you can change your life in all sorts of ways. Taking steps to reduce aches and pains can immediately improve your relationship with your significant other, children, family, and friends.
It's essential to be smart about how you use sophisticated machines, especially the ones you use for prolonged periods. Overcome minor and even severe physical problems with Ergonomics for Home-Based Workers.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781458209429
Publisher:	Abbott Press
Publication date:	06/13/2013
Pages:	198
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.45(d)

Read an Excerpt

ERGONOMICS FOR HOME-BASED WORKERS

USE YOUR BRAIN TO SAVE YOUR BODY

---

By Marilyn Ekdahl Ravicz

Abbott Press

Copyright © 2013 Marilyn Ekdahl Ravicz
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4582-0942-9

---

CHAPTER 1

BACKGROUND PLANNING

The growing international world of home-based workers has taken the socioeconomic world by storm. There are even humorous cartoons created about the trials, problems and successes of home-based workers. Scientists are turning their sights on home-based workers, and International conferences of savants are setting their intellectual sights on the yeas and nays of this broad-based work revolution. Why? Because working at home has become so widespread that we can joke about the implications of working at home and generally share the humor or pathos expressed by a relatively new technological and social phenomenon. At the same time, however, we can also lament that so little has been made public about how to make working at home more comfortable for the home-based worker.

This book is designed to stick its ergonomic thumb into this information gap and help the reader make arrangements to support and facilitate comfort while working at home. Even if you agree with Mark Twain who said, "I do not like work, even when someone else does it," tasks have a way of taking over most of our waking hours. So why not make work more comfortable and less tiring by using your brain to save your body?

Whether you work at home for love, for money, for your family or just for yourself, you are on your own when planning how and in what ways you should arrange and perform home-based tasks more comfortably. That knowledge challenge is where ergonomic planning can and will help home-based workers. There is a body of helpful proven information about methods and performance aids to assist workers.

As early as 2005, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), under the aegis of the US Department of Health and Human Services, reported that the third leading cause of nonfatal unintentional injuries among all ages in the United States was simply Unintentional Overexertion. Now that phrase may sound like a movie title about an unhappy love affair, a verbal placebo, or a bad dream, but it is none of the above. Unintentional overexertion is paraphrased as: working the body or a body part too hard, causing damage to muscle, tendon, ligament, cartilage, joint, or peripheral nerves – the common cause of strains, sprains and even twisted ankles. That conclusion meant that over three million accidents were caused by some kind of overexertion, 53% of which occurred among adults ages 25-54. Those decades clearly include prime working years.

In other words, unintentional pushing, pulling, lifting, or simply the prolonged repetitive use of excessive force when using tools cause a huge percentage of disabling physical problems – even if unintentional. While many employers have tried to indoctrinate their workers with ergonomic ideas and guidance, very little of this knowledge has been directed to home-based workers, whether employed or not.

Unfortunately, people offering 'how to' suggestions sound like teachers, politicians, rabbis, preachers, priests, or new-fangled trainers, but that's a risk I'll take. Since I'm safe behind these printed pages, I'll risk your intermittent frustration and continue pounding home some important ergonomic messages. Ergonomic adaptations are a small price to pay in order to escape hearing a doctor pronounce negative diagnoses into your tender ears. So what if you throw this book across the room now and then. It weighs little, and throwing is a mild form of recommended exercise.

Now on a positive note, the suggestions in this book should assist any home-based worker to work at home more safely and with higher efficiency levels while feeling less discomfort and fatigue. Everyone works at home, whether for money, self-care, family or children ('house-apes' and 'crumb-snatchers' my crotchety old professor used to call children). These days it is also a socioeconomic fact that more people work at home to earn their livelihoods.

This book is not filled with diagrams or photos of postures, furniture or tools, since these are omnipresent and available through the internet, magazines and government pamphlets. My first goal is to make the home-based worker aware of the reasons and processes behind work-related physical problems, because these problems are what make ergonomic planning worthwhile. Many work-related physical problems can be avoided through ergonomic planning.

What is this thing called work? While job descriptions can vary wildly from brain surgery to pickle sorting, one thing is certain: sooner or later work makes us tired. It can make us not only weary, but uncomfortable, pained and bored by its repetition. Work can cause us to use our bodies in ways that are stressful and cause pain. So here I take my bow and tell you that it is possible to make ergonomic 'arrangements' to work smarter and avoid dangerous stressors that cause unnecessary physical strains. However, to accomplish this noble task, it is necessary to review the biomechanics of overexertion and compare these with home-based workers and how, when, where, and with what tools, and postures they work. All the pieces of the work-puzzle must be available for review before plans can fit them into more productive ergonomic goals.

We are all home-based workers for different reasons. You can answer why you work at home for yourself, although your answers will probably fall under the few categories that center on finance, self, and/ or household family care. Lagging far behind is the category 'for the fun of it,' if you happen to work on consuming hobbies. This workbook will not be a song of praise for work, but more like a hopeful meditation that you will make working at home more pleasant and painless.

Be patient and soon enough you will learn what ergonomic really means. In all its colorful masquerade costumes, you already know what work is, and how much of your life it shapes. The suggestions made should be especially helpful for the increasing number of persons who work-for-pay at home, either as self-employed or sub-contracted employees through outsourcing programs sponsored by companies and organizations.

Why bother? Because home-based workers are usually left on their own to perform repetitive tasks in whatever environment they have, and with whatever tools they can scrounge to use. Or perhaps you are a volunteer dedicated to programs of an admirable humanistic nature. Or perhaps a dust-hating overly zealous housewife? Or a frustrated male TV Chef? Or compulsive gardener? Whatever their age or sex, ergonomic planning applies to all home-based workers and their co-residents. That rule includes the five-year-old you've temporarily assigned to care for your three-year-old while you hide in the bathroom for five minutes – the only peaceful escape hatch with a door.

If you work at home for love or money, you are responsible for planning your work patterns, as well as arranging the rooms and tools in and with which you labor and rest. Even when self-employed or working as a sub-contractor, it is not likely that some boss will send trained work evaluators to your residence to assess safety or ergonomic compliance. Let's be frank, home-based workers are and will remain mostly on their own. Moreover, they may also be responsible for helping their co-residents, whether children, teenagers, or over-the-hill parents and grandparents. The multi-generational residence profile is also on the rise.

Perhaps you don't need to be convinced that good ergonomic planning will be helpful, but do you also know that it can help avoid accidents and improve work quality? While few statistics are available to prove that last conclusion, since there's no legal way to research home-based qualitative out-put, common knowledge and peasant cunning (just joking) tell us that fatigue and body overuse increase accident potential. Remember the old saw (based on actuarial statistics) that most accidents happen at home? Home-based accidents might well occur less often if home-based workers follow ergonomic guidelines and become aware of faulty body postures or tool usage.

So what does that adage about most accidents occurring at home mean today? It means that besides the traditional housewife, farmer, rancher or retired person, more home-based workers need to learn how to work safely on their own. Being a home-based worker, whether paid or not, can be a two-edged sword of freedom and responsibility; therefore, he or she must learn how to fence ergonomically.

Current computer-based technologies, including being online, Skype, virtual private networks, video-conferencing and Voice over IP among other peripherals, collectively support a virtual explosion of home-based telecommuting jobs; however, computer-based work also requires repetitive motions and static postures over extended time periods, and strain injuries occur to the body parts involved. Assembly lines are not entirely extinct; they have been transformed into other forms of repetitive-action work.

Well-arranged home work stations, well-designed ergonomic tools and furniture, as well as appropriate work habits applied collectively will minimize accidents and alleviate overuse/abuse of the body. Ergonomics does not promise the millennium or that fatigue and pain will melt away, but it does suggest that if its guidelines are followed, discomfort and frustration from daily work will lessen.

While assembly lines are not part of home employment, unless you have several children (no joke intended), the computer-culture has enabled and fueled an increase in home-based employment that is startling in scope. This trend is projected to increase dramatically. Being on-line and hooked-up not only to data, but also to other persons and places, combined with the capacity to research, write and send reports, communicate or buy and sell, are all made possible by computers and attendant technologies. Since many work-related tasks can be as easily done at home as in an office or factory, a significant number of persons works part or full-time at home instead of in traditional work sites.

It is difficult to obtain accurate empirical data or statistics regarding home-based employment due to privacy issues, but also because these data constantly change. OSHA (the Occupational Safety and Health Organization) is not geared to impinge on the privacy of homes to assess safety and health work factors; however, one thing is certain: current statistics of home-based workers are soon obsolete as new increments take their place.

As early as 2005, a report from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics noted an increase in home-based employment to 15% of the worker population, and projected sharper future increases. Even then, 30% of all workers in management, professional and related occupations reported working at home at least a portion of their work week. Other industrialized information-based countries also report and predict notable increases in home-based telecommuting workers. Essentially, other than agricultural, educational, public-service, travel or some industry jobs, predicted increments in home-based employment are a proven socioeconomic trend. By 2008, 2.5 million employees stated they worked at home on their primary jobs; but by 2010, 9.4 million reported working from home on their primary jobs.

In December of 2010, the US government passed the Telework Enhancement Act of 2010, to promote management effectiveness for teleworkers, to achieve reductions in transportation and environmental impacts, and to enhance the positive work-life balance of home-based teleworkers. Telework typically allows workers to better manage family obligations, and helps to maintain a more resilient work force, since most home-based workers state a preference for working at home. As an aside, the government considers this act to support and comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990.

The growth of telecommunicating from home is world-wide, and has become the focus of recent international conferences. For example, the, Stanford University Department of Economics and the Boston College Center for Work and Family met in Conference with several large international companies on November 12, 2012. Conferees discussed the many aspects of the home-based worker trend, and even noted the growth of Worldwide Work at Home Employment Agencies. In fact, many current and future home-based employees may never meet their bosses and peers face to face, but only communicate with them in the other world of virtual sounds and photos.

Since the 1970's, when Jack Nilles, funded by the National Science Foundation, coined the word teleworking, intellectuals have been struggling to analyze or describe everything from the nature of home-based worker output, the wording of outsourcing contracts and the benefits of home-based work, to the problems (often legal) related to sub-contracts for worker output and ownership of equipment issues. Most Independent home-based workers have no c ontractual protections insofar as this can be known currently.

After the Clean Air Act of 1990, federal and state governments were positive and instrumental in the teleworking from home movement for environmental reasons. Home-based workers minimize traffic and help employers achieve alternative human resource and financial objectives.

As most industrialized countries become more aware of work place accidents and employee compensation costs, a positive international platform for home-based employment is being accepted and embraced. Financially, less insurance means higher gains, and fewer workers on site mean less space is needed. In sum, the international world of home-based workers is growing, and improved telecommunication options drive this trend for employers who that find outsourcing is cost-effective.

By now, social awareness of this process has prompted humorists to satirize this trend, and some refer to it as 'shirking from home.' Nevertheless, statistics demonstrate that the positive aspects of home-based work outweigh the negative ones, such as being promoted simply through 'presenteeism,' or being face-to-face on-site. That this trend is international is obvious on many fronts. Recently, CNN's online vehicle (CNNLiving) is publishing articles focusing on the pros and cons of home-based working, and inviting others to contribute to this on-going 'community' of similar workers pertinent hints or opinions regarding their experiences. The import of telework is world-wide.

Although no details were available, the following statistics gathered by Britain's Department of Trade and Industry for their annual report on home worker accidents in one city can be seen to be humorous and humbling. This happened as early as 2001:

"... three dozen people were sent to the hospital for injuries associated with teapot covers; about 165 for injuries from placemats; about 330 from toilet-paper holders, and about 13,000 from vegetables (sic); However, sponge-related accidents fell from 996 the previous year to 787, and only 329 injuries from meat cleavers were reported," (New Scientist, June).

While there is something whimsical about pondering injuries caused by vegetables and teapot covers, the Alice in Wonderland aura of the report is serious. The report was deemed worthy of publication as early as 2001, because these people were injured enough to be hospitalized and noted in British work statistics! Although I offer few suggestions here regarding the ergonomic handling of vegetables, sponges, or toilet-paper holders, this book does afford productive hints about other procedures.

It is assumed that employers will continue to support home-based working and outsourcing trends for economic reasons: it considerably reduces employer overhead; increases worker productivity (proven in some countries); is easier to recruit high demand workers; reduces worker stress; helps clean air compliance; reduces the costs of work-related disabilities; reduces absenteeism; and accommodates workers with disabilities or conditions like pregnancies and child bearing. Ouch! What about male mid-life crises? While I find it almost whimsical that working at home is said to reduce absenteeism, I'll accept that as a corollary to injury by teapot covers and unintentional overexertion.

This list of positive employer economic gains through telecommuting was partly suggested by riskVue, the webzine for Risk Management Professionals who seek to address the positive and negative factors of outsourced telecommuting. In sum, teleworking is here to stay.

On the negative side, medical insurance, homeowner policies, liability exposures and contractual ambiguities (if they are even offered) also obtain. Moreover, it could happen that companies might one day incur problems of compliance with OSHA's work safety and related air quality regulations which, according to informal research, are too often honored in the breach.
(Continues...)

---

Excerpted from ERGONOMICS FOR HOME-BASED WORKERS by Marilyn Ekdahl Ravicz. Copyright © 2013 Marilyn Ekdahl Ravicz. Excerpted by permission of Abbott Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---

Table of Contents

Contents

Preface....................     vii     

Chapter 1 Background Planning....................     1     

Chapter 2 The Marvelous Human Machine....................     19     

Chapter 3 Profiling The Body's Work Sensitive Areas....................     30     

Chapter 4 Learn To Know Your Own Work Patterns....................     34     

Chapter 5 Physical Foibles: Why Atlas Had A Bad Back....................     42     

Chapter 6 The Self-Appointed House Detective....................     68     

Chapter 7 Humble Or Not, There's No Place Like Home!....................     79     

Chapter 8 Tools Of The Trade You Might Like To Trade....................     158     

Chapter 9 The Environment: Allergies And Air Quality....................     164     

Chapter 10 Challenges: Teaching Old Dogs New Tricks....................     170     

Organizations And Associations....................     179