Use of Ergonomic Data in Effective and Defensible Pre-Employment Programs

What is a reasonable amount of work to ask an individual to perform? This question is an ancient one. The "Egyptian Book of the Dead," circa 150 BC, poses this in a prayer to be admitted into the underworld, stating "I did not ask anyone to work past their abilities." In the modern-day era, we are faced with conflicting priorities and restrictions that impact the answer to this question. From a traditional industrial engineering approach, we design job requirements and machines around a certain population set. Often they are designed for either 90–95-percent of the working population. As engineers know, as the design parameters become more inclusive of a greater percent of the population, the cost of both design and set up of that workstation exponentially increases. By definition, the design parameters exclude or discriminate against a certain percent of the population.