Designing Ergonomic, Safe, and Attractive Mining Workplaces

Book excerpt: The mining industry has experienced important improvements with regard to its safety record and work environment. But there is still room for further improvement and the mining industry now faces the challenge of securing a future workforce: The current workforce is aging, and mining work increasingly requires a more qualified workforce. Designing Ergonomic, Safe, and Attractive Mining Workplaces seeks to give an understanding of what must be considered in the design of mining workplaces. By reviewing and discussing the historic and current development of the mining industry as well as problems related to the safety, ergonomics, and attractiveness of mining workplaces, it demonstrates that the challenges facing the mining industry often need to be solved on a case-to-case basis. The processes through which these issues are managed are of significant importance. To facilitate a proactive approach, the book covers the principles of systematic work environment management, together with examples of methods for risk management and work environment monitoring. It introduces a systematic and iterative design and planning method for the mining industry. This method acknowledges that all relevant stakeholders must be able to influence the design of ergonomic, safe, and attractive mining workplaces. Features Takes a holistic and sociotechnical approach to current and future problems of the mining industry, which normally are dealt with in isolation or through technology Reviews historic, current, and future issues in the mining industry with regards to workplace attractiveness, health, safety, mechanization, automation, and work organization Provides several examples of these issues and attempts to address them (successfully and unsuccessfully) Covers the principles of systematic work environment management together with examples of methods for risk management and work environment monitoring for pro-actively dealing with work environment issues Introduces a systematic and iterative design and planning method for the mining industry that aims to avoid problems of traditional planning approaches and increase stakeholder and employee participation