An ergonomic assessment of the airline baggage handler

21various body positions, with and without the knowledge of the center of mass, werereviewed.3.2 Review of Dell's Survey of Safety ProfessionalsDell (1997) states that "the most common type of injury suffered by people at work areback injuries". Labor-intensive jobs that involve material handling and repetitive liftingare high in cases of muscle and joint pains. The Baggage handling job is intense withrepetitious lifting, pulling, pushing, bending, and stretching of the body and its variousparts. Over time this could be extremely taxing on the body causing various breakdownsand deterioration of muscles, bones, and joints. Out of these highlighted body segmentsthe back is a body region especially susceptible to injuries caused by lifting. 20% of allinjuries and illnesses in the workplace of the US were back injuries, costing companiesover 20 billion dollars (NIOSH, 1994). Moreover, back injury expenses of baggagehandlers totaled an average of twenty one million dollars per annum collectively for 15airlines and a ground handling company in 1992 through 1994 (Dell, 1997).Historically, one of the first groups to track the rate of back injuries to baggagehandlers was the International Air Transport Executive of the National Safety Council ofAmerica (ARTEX). ARTEX highlighted a case where 340 baggage handlers across 10different airlines were involved in some type of injury related to material and baggagehandling. This study attributed 85% of those injuries to the baggage handlers werecaused by working the narrow-bodied flights (Dell, 1997). Since the 80's there has beenan effort to focus on back injury and material handling (Dell, 1997). In one of the earlierstudies, conducted by ARTEX (ARTEX, 1981) of 10 airline companies, found that 340baggage handlers incurred back injuries in 1977. Eighty five percent of those injuries