OFFICE WORK CAN BE DANGEROUS TO YOUR HEALTH: A Handbook of Office Health and Safety Hazards and What You Can Do About Them

Detailed, up-to-date guidance on health hazards in the office and how to minimize them. Stellman (Work is Dangerous to Your Health) and Henifin are both associated with Columbia U.'s Women's Occupational Health Resource Center; Stellman recently carried out one of the few large scale studies of hazards in the workplace. An important finding was the major extent to which the physical environment--not just the psychological environment, the usual focus of white-collar studies--affects worker health and well-being. The physical factors implicated include noise, air quality, machine usage (especially of video display terminals), degree of privacy, amount of workspace, and the number of times a worker had to change his or her work-station. Among the equally important--and more widely acknowledged--psychological factors were: employer attitude; the extent to which people control their work; and the presence of deadlines. Against this background, the authors first discuss ""The Biology of Office Work""--how offices affect our bodies, system-by-system (e.g., fluorescent lights and eye damage)--and then move on to specific hazards and how to counter them. Video display terminals receive special attention because of the range of hazards they present--to vision, to hands and arms (because of poor keyboard design), and in terms of radiation emission. Methods of eliminating hazards are precisely indicated: how to establish the best ventilation patterns, how to measure the combustibility of individual items in formulating a fire plan, etc. The newer, white-collar-consciousness-raising books (like Cassedy and Nussbaum's 9 TO 5, p. 1030) draw upon this material; here it is, neat.