Efeitos de um programa de ginástica laboral: estudo de caso em uma indústria de calçados

Abstract

The changes that occurred after the industrial revolution had a significant impact on the work environment. The market has become more competitive with companies investing more in their work processes due to increased productivity. While this, advances have interfered in the lives of workers, who have adapted technological and organizational innovations, as a requirement for productivity and long working hours, in addition to living in new working conditions. In the case of women, they are faced with a double work day, as they are responsible for domestic tasks and care for their children. Thus, work is one of the factors that affect the quality of life of individuals, and can generate negative impacts on workers health and well-being. Given this, companies seek strategic actions that can minimize the negative effect and form preventively, such as Labor Gymnastics. Thus, the purpose of this study is to verify and compare the effects of a workout program of labor gymnastics on men and women workers in a shoe industry. For this, the participants of the program were classified according to the frequency of physical activity (non participants and who participated in 2, 4 or 5 days per week) for six months. After that, the workers were interviewed in order to identify the benefits perceived through the study variables: relief of musculoskeletal pain, improvement of physical and psychological wellbeing, difficulty in performing tasks, willingness to work and interpersonal relationships among co-workers. With the data collected, we sought to analyze the correlation between the dependent variable (physical activity frequency) and the independent variables (variables of study) through the construction of ordinal logistic regression models for each gender. As a result, the higher frequency of physical activity reduces the difficulty of performing work tasks for men (OR=0.49, 0.27-0.87); and for women increased osteomuscular pain relief (OR=3.12, 2.07-4.71), improved the relationship between co-workers (OR=2.83, 1.67-4.81) and improvement in physical and psychological well-being (OR =1.98, 1.06-3.70). It was concluded that a labor gymnastics program generates significant positive effects on the workers and that due to some factors can have a different repercussion in the perception for men and women.