In October 2017 we published the first blog in a series to highlight musculoskeletal health research at NIOSH. With the holiday season upon us, this next installment will take the opportunity to discuss how best to promote musculoskeletal health in retail establishments to reduce the incidence of musculoskeletal disorders among temporary retail workers. Temporary or seasonal retail workers employed through staffing agencies are often at a disadvantage compared to full-time employees doing the same job because they tend not to receive the same training or the same personal protective equipment as full-time employees.1
In 2015 there were approximately 20 million employees in wholesale and retail trade (WRT) industries. Nearly 17 million of those workers had jobs in retail. Job-related tasks in retail require workers to lift large volumes of consumer goods, stand for prolonged periods of time, and repetitively reach, bend, twist, and assume other unnatural postures when handling merchandise or assisting buyers. Of every 10,000 retail workers in 2015, an average 36.5 reported a musculoskeletal disorder.2Manual material handling is the most frequent hazard in the WRT sector and accounts for the majority of reported work-related musculoskeletal disorders in retail industries.3 Research has shown that ergonomically designed manual materials handling equipment (such as height-adjusted lift tables or conveyers) allow greater numbers of retail workers to perform material handling tasks without the added risk of injury and loss of work.