This paper is based on a literature review and interviews made with managers in small-scale nurseries for pot plant production. The review helped to identify the worst occupational hazards in pot plant production. The interviews provided a way to investigate how the nurseries act so as to avoid the worst hazards and what they do to even out work intensive periods during the season in order to get a more even distribution of work over the year.
According to available statistics problems with back and shoulders are the most common of the physical disorders and the risk for occupational accidents are high for greenhouse workers. Most of the occupational injuries are connected to musculoskeletal problems. The handling of material is often manual and involves frequent lifting and carrying of heavy loads, the strenuous work postures and static muscular tensions these repetitive tasks are associated with causes straining and overloading. Here we find the roots for occupational disease common among workers in the gardening industry. An advantage with the smaller nurseries is that workers can have more varied tasks, compared with those working for larger companies.
In Sweden the garden industry is small compared to other private industries, something, which also explain the little interests in society and within the engineering industry for the above mentioned problems. However, considering the fact that there are many small garden enterprises around the world the problems are huge.
The variation of work tasks between small-scale nurseries is one reason these occupational health hazards remain unaddressed. Another reason has to do with the fact that small-scale nurseries tend to have a huge variation of work tasks caused by e.g. seasonal changes. The solutions to these problems need to be individual for each nursery. This makes it difficult to make a profitable industry out of mass-producing technical solutions.
The interviews indicate that the nurseries themselves acquired technical solutions for reducing the most common occupational health hazards. The plans for investing in these solutions involve great costs and hence depend on the financial state of the company, something that often result in random purchases of solutions which happened to be on offer.
The interviews also show that many problems remains unsolved and that there is a lot of self made te...
