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Dec 14, 2023

Workers Say The Physical Demands Of Their Jobs Are Increasing


     From the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College:

For obvious reasons, people who do physically demanding work are prone to injuring themselves on the job and are more likely than office workers to apply for federal disability benefits.

But is technology changing this relationship?

We know technology has caused a decline in manual labor, and the blue-collar jobs that remain are also easier to perform when machinery and computers are doing more of the heavy lifting workers used to do – think warehouse robots that alleviate the need to lift and carry heavy boxes.

But new research based on a survey of couples between ages 51 and 61 – a population that is particularly vulnerable to illness and musculoskeletal disabilities – finds no evidence they feel the physical demands on them are lessening. If anything, they said, the requirements for motions like stooping, lifting, or crouching have increased somewhat since the early 1990s.

Their perceptions conflict with the other studies showing an easing in the demands on blue-collar workers. But those studies are not based on what older people are saying about their jobs but on analyses of an occupational database that rates the intensity of the specific tasks required in each job. One example is how many pounds a warehouse worker must lift and how often that is required. ...

2 comments:

  1. Not applicable to the article. But the senate executive schedule posted seems to show that O'Malley's confirmation vote is (hopefully) to be held 12/18/2023 @ 5:30pm

    https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/executive_calendar/xcalv.pdf

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  2. I am not surprised by this. I have noticed in my hearings that when asked to describe the exertional level of my claimants' past work they are more frequently saying medium is described in the DOT but heavy as they have described it.

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