Supermarket workers: their work and their health, particularly their self-reported musculoskeletal problems and...

A literature review revealed that cashiers are the most studied of all supermarket workers, while little is known about other types of employees. However, cashiers are far from being the only supermarket workers affected by musculoskeletal disorders. The musculoskeletal health of supermarket employees other than cashiers was therefore examined for one company. Two sources of data were used: compensation statistics (from the company's 57 corporate supermarkets) and self-reported questionnaires (administered in 4 selected stores). These sources provided very different descriptive statistics, both in terms of the size of problems (depending on which aspects were compared, compensation statistics depicted 2 to 18 times fewer disorders than self-reports), and in terms of which body regions were most affected. There were also discrepancies with regard to identifying those departments which were most at risk (wrappers according to self-reports, delicatessen according to compensation reports). According to self-reports, 83% of workers (excluding cashiers) reported at least one musculoskeletal disorder over a 12-month period, and 32% had problems severe enough to impede regular activities. Different approaches to calculating rates were also used within each data source. Calculations using the number of hours worked annually by all workers were deemed to be the best. The significance of these results for supermarket employees and in terms of intervention and prevention in other sectors is examined.