Evaluation of Job Changes within the Refractory Ceramic Fiber Industry and HowThey Effect an Employee's Occupational Exposures

摘要

Knowing the comprehensive history of a job or an employee's occupational exposureis important for determining worker exposures. Changes associated with jobs or job tasks can impact these exposures significantly. Often job descriptions are too general or are inadequate for determining a worker's true occupational exposure history. Collection of detailed task information may be helpful for categorizing worker exposures. This study used data collected annually by personal interview with individual employees between the years of 1988 and 1993 at three separate Refractory Ceramic Fiber (ROF) plants. Initially, over 350 Current Employee Questionnaire (CEO) interviews were evaluated and compiled on a computerized spreadsheet. Tasks were listed for each job title, year, and frequency reported from the interviews and cross-referenced to individual workers. To reduce inter-individual variability, only those interviews for which an individual worker was questioned for two or more years and did not change job titles were used. This reduced the number of CEO interviews to 69.