| Abstract: | The leather industry in this study is an industry with human subjects, which can be divided into leather making and leather products. The leather industry in Taiwan is facing the problems of aging among the operator members, and of rising wages with lower profits. In order to solve the impact of the current predicament, and in response to the changing of the leather market,the leather industry manufactors need to improve their productiontechnology, introduce the modern management methods, improve the working environment, and bring in the talents.
This study indicates that the working enviornment in many manufactoring plants is with hightemperature, noise, wetfloor,anddust. In addition, the manufacturing process focuses on quick, a lot of preparation and delivery.The parts which can not be automated must add more operators to maintain the smooth flow of goods and production process, such as handling of leather, confirmation of leather specifications and color, manual machinery production handling. All these jobs are highly repeated and can not be replaced by automation. Operators work in a highly dust polluted enviornment and handle chemical materials all the time, so they easily have respiratory diseases and allergies caused by exposure to dust in the air and chemicals in the skin and even cancer risk.
These occupationalinjuries and musculoskeletal injuries arepredictable. Furthermore, after the interview with the person in charge, the operators are mainly older and work in a fast and professional division. They are forced toaccelerate their body movements to match the speed of the machine, and work in high-repetitive working enviornment with unnatural working postures for long working hours, which easily resulting in any discomfort of musculoskeletal system.
For this study, the operators of the leather production units are the major study subjects. Interviews, on-site job analysis and observation are used in this study. The study explores the risk factors for musculoskeletaldiscomfort that the operators may easily counter and the environmental health hazards. Suggestions would be presented for further their facilities improvements including the proposed environmental and operating proceduresand the capacity constraints and needs of the operator in order to reduce the occurrence of errors, to promote the company's production efficiency. |
