Occupational Hazards and their Impact On Workers In Pulp and Paper Industries

Abstract

The use of numerous synthetic chemicals and other aspects of constructed environment in paper industry have become a matter of concern to the environmentalists. Several studies have revealed that chemical industries are associated with health hazards. However, precious little data is available about the effects of such environment on the health of workers in these industries. Therefore, present study was aimed to investigate the existence of various psychological disorders and physical ailments in workers exposed to hazardous environment in factory premises. The data was collected on a specially designed survey performa from different pulp and paper industries. It was found that the workers were provided with protecting devices but most of them do not use them because of unawareness and climatic discomfort. In order to check the effectiveness of protecting/preventives devises, the workers were divided into two categories : (i) directly exposed (not taking preventive measures) and (ii) indirectly exposed (taking preventive measures) against these conditions vis-à-vis their health (healthy and sick), working conditions (good & poor) and job satisfaction (satisfied and unsatisfied). The extent of correlation amongst health, work environment and job satisfaction has been studied by using Youle’s Coefficient of association and to test the significance of association, Chi-square test of independence of attributes was deployed. The comparison of the two categories was made by using test of proportions. The statistical significance of the differences of the two categories of workers vis-a-vis their physical and mental health was studied by using test of proportions (Z-test). It was found that with the exception of the association between job satisfaction and physical health, which is moderately positive, there is high degree of positive association amongst job satisfaction-mental health and work environment; work environment-physical and mental health.