A Study on the Factors Influencing Overall Fatigue and Musculoskeletal Pains in Automobile Manufacturing Production Workers

Abstract

In South Korea, the automobile sector is a key industry that occupies a very large proportion of production, employment, and exports in the national economy. However, production workers in the automobile industry are still exposed to a wide range of risk factors. This study aims to investigate the relationships between personal characteristics or occupational hazard exposure and subjective overall fatigue or musculoskeletal pains in the automobile manufacturing industry. We extracted 446 automobile manufacturing production workers as subjects from the data of the 5th Korean Working Conditions Survey. The χ2 test is performed to test whether there are differences in the distribution of complaints of musculoskeletal pains or overall fatigue in view of personal characteristics and exposure to working environment hazards and logistic regression analysis was used to analyze the relationships between them. Results showed that the proportions of the overall fatigue and musculoskeletal pains of the complaining group increase as the hazard exposure time increases. Longer exposure to tobacco smoke shows higher rates of complaints of overall fatigue and musculoskeletal pain. Results of logistic regression show that gender, longer exposure to fumes and dust, manual heavy loads handling, and to repetitive motion were the risk factors for overall fatigue and that gender, work experience, longer working hours, longer exposure to noise, fumes and dust, awkward posture, and high temperature were risk factors for musculoskeletal pains. The results show that there are close relationships between personal characteristics, working environment hazards, overall fatigue, and musculoskeletal pains.