Ergonomical Assessment Of A Workplace Essay Example for Free

Ergonomical Assessment Of A Workplace Essay Posture and muscular activity is an inevitable process of work that can never be avoided in several jobs today. As a packaging agent [someone who assists in a packaging center for parcel or air delivery], a person is intended to face several challenges on how an individual’s workplace be worthwhile so as not to get stressed physically and mentally at once when that particular individual is already at work. This is where the role of ergonomical assessment comes in the picture. What is ergonomical assessment? Primarily, this workplace assessment depends on the ways by which the arrangement is considered by the employers. This assessment actually focuses on the ways by which the physical activities of the employees are relatively considered when the employers themselves are planning the work areas. The idea is that the work areas should equally be comfortable enough to prolong the fine performance of their employees at work. Through the concern of the employers as to how their workers are using their physical strength to complete the tasks that they are supposed to attend to, the profit and the capability of the entire business company in assisting their clients with their demands would be much easier to attain on the part of the employees at work. In this paper, the work area of a packaging center in the Army Post Office or the APO in the postal clerk (PC) area. The description of the area as well as the type of work done within the area shall be discussed within the paragraphs that follow. Through the use of the WISHA guidelines, the said branch of army operations shall be observed and evaluated as to how much work-efficient the work area of the said branch is to its employees. The Work and the Area The nature of the work is rather demanding in terms of physical patience whereas the employees are expected to have constant track of their task while they discipline their bodies in dealing with the stresses that the work itself brings them. The work begins when the PC receives the package from the customer, weighs it, places postage on it, and then moves the package to a receiving window. There is only 1 shift which lasts 10 hours with a 1-hour lunch break. The packages range from 1 pound to a max weight of 80 pounds. On average, a single PC will handle 120 packages a shift 6 days a week. This does not include letter mail. The average package weight is 35 pounds. The PC is required to stand all shift except for breaks on a wooden floor with no mats. The package weighing counter is made of wood and is 24 inches tall x 30 inches wide x 24 inches deep. The computer for postage input sits on the same counter at a height of 38 inches. The packages once weighed have to be lifted and moved across a distance of 65 inches directly behind the PC. The packages are placed in a cutout window that sits 32 inches off the ground and is 30 inches tall x 30 inches wide. From the overview of both the he job and the work area where the job is performed, it could be noted that the tasks actually involve massive muscular stress. This is simply because of the fact that the employees are required to stand for long hours, not to mention that fact that they need to deal with several weights of packages and are then supposed to work with a not-so conducive work-area. According to the WISHA guidelines, there are several repetitive activities that endangers the muscular system of a particular worker, especially with the fact that the said activities are done in long hours. As noted above, the employees are expected to report to work in ten hours with just one hour of lunch break. According to the description, the package receiving area is composed of facilities whereas the employees would need to bend down and work their ways to finish the task that they are supposed to complete. The area is less conducive in assisting the employees in fixing the packages in a more comfortable posture as the description points out that the Package Receivers need to carry or lift the package from the receiving area to the weighing area. The employees need to bend down and kneel down to fix the packages for departure for at least 120 times within the ten hour shift that they are supposed to complete; WISHA guidelines actually consider this fact dangerous on the part of the employees performing the task. According to the guidelines, lifting more than 25 pounds above the shoulders below the knees at arm’s length must be done in a maximum of 25 times per day (WISHA Checklist). However, in the case of the employees in the packaging area, they are doing this particular task in almost 120 times per day. This is seriously hazardous on the muscular activities of their body as well as with their backbone resistance to stress. Aside from this, the act of repetitively raising the hands above the head or the elbow above the shoulders more than once per minute is also a hazardous on the part of the employees (WISHA checklist). As for the case of the work nature noted in this paper, this is particularly something that needs to given constant attention by the management of the APO as observed herein. As the description points out that the employees are working at least 5 hours straight at the most then takes a break and then another 5 hours of work shall indeed bring stress on the physical body of the employees. It should also be noted that the job places the employees in a situation with which they are supposed to stay in an area that is uncarpeted where they are supposed to stand for long hours. The pressure of the weight of the body and the weight of the packages that they carry back and forth the area would bring much stressing weight on their feet. For this reason, not only the muscular areas on the upper body of the employees are strongly affected by the job, it also affects the lower muscular area of the employees which includes the feet. Not only does the job-tasks bring pressure to the back bone of the employees, but it also leaves a high level of pressure on the leg and feet area of the said individuals. For this reason, it is highly recommended that the office be fixed, rearranged in a way that the lifting of the packages be minimized through putting the receiving area and the weighing area much closer to each other. Additional fixing tables could be placed nearby where all the needed materials for packaging and providing receipts to the clients would be of better breach by the employee could be further implemented.  This would not only increase the performance level of the employees, it would also regulate the time spent by the employees in finishing their jobs thus giving them the chance in serving more clients within the 10 hour shift that they are to complete everyday. Conclusion From the assessment presented herein, it could be noted that most of the parts of the office that has been observed [packaging office of APO] has so much hazardous areas for the employees of the business.  This is the reason why the management of the said establishment is suggested to have a consideration on how the areas of the office best serve the employees and the clients as well. Making the area more conducive for the type of work that is performed in the office would not only increase the performance complexities of the employees but it will also increase the satisfaction of the clients with the services that they are supposed to receive from the establishment and the employees working for them.

The Good and Evil in Literature and Poetry :: Othello

The Good and Evil in Literature and Poetry Sir Philip Sidney, in his quote about poetry (literature) as it pertains to real life vice and virtue, is indeed correct that it can have a lasting effect on the way one acts, however, he is making a gross generalization when he states that a portrayal of pure virtue can divinely inspire, where as a portrayal of evil can herd the masses away from evil deeds. The true social value of poetry and literature is not in the portrayal of vice against virtue, but rather when the two meet inside a protagonist. It is the illumination of the paradox of right and wrong that gives us truly poignant literature. We can truly understand things about ourselves when we read about characters being pulled in two directions: as Queen Elizabeth in her struggles between romantic and patriotic love, or Othello as he is torn between jealousy and love, or as Abraham struggles with the murder of his son as a testament of faith. Queen Elizabeth is an obvious example of how such a paradox can be helpful and inspirational. She writes, in On Monsieur’s Departure, about how she has a duty to the state, but at the same time, wishes to love romantically in spite of it. The reader can truly relate to the character, because she is not without fault, nor is she without virtue–literature which sheds equal value to the good and the bad in humans is the most illuminating and useful. The irony in this situation is the fact that the modern reader cannot even be sure which of the desires expressed by the queen is virtue and which is vice. Love of country is good, but fulfilling one’s own needs is good too. Ultimately, we learn from Elizabeth’s poem that one must make choices–that what is virtuous can also be harmful, and likewise. Othello gives us a similar glimpse into the train-wreck that is the human mind when determining right from wrong. As the plot unfolds, the reader finds it hard to fault Othello’s actions, as he is only trying to do what is right and honorable. Even after he is duped into believing his wife is an adulterer, he still has a deep love for her (which is why Iago’s lies eat at him as they do). Eventually, Othello commits a murder which he views as the only "right" thing to do.

Regime Type and its Influences on Growth Essay

During the last period of the 20th century, the world has observed the so called â€Å"Asian Miracle†, the phenomenon refers to Asian countries that achieved a very high growth rate that western countries have never experience before. Interestingly, one common thing these Asia countries have in common are the experience of a certain level of dictatorship. For example, China’s economy during 1960-1980 was heavily centralized and the private sector was not allowed to exist. Singapore gained their independence in 1945 and started to develop with the leading role of government. Japan, Malaysia, Korea, and Vietnam experienced the same level of dictatorship when they started to open their market and turn into market economies. The idea behind this phenomenon is because the government can quickly decide what industry to investment in and the large investment help these industries to acquire economics of scale quickly. The government takes the leading role as the distributor of resources instead of the market as in Western countries. My study aims at examine the relationship between the level of dictatorship and the growth rate. Literature Review That good governance is necessary for economic development was until recently the conventional wisdom. In 2002, for example, a USAID study asserted that â€Å"without good governance, it is impossible to foster development†. Lately, however, this paradigm has begun to lose ground. Robert Zoellick, president of the World Bank, argued in an October 2010 speech that development practitioners should embrace â€Å"differentiated policy approaches† noting that â€Å"what may safeguard (development) in one context my strangle in another†. The leaders of the G20 nations in November endorsed a â€Å"Seoul Consensus† that â€Å"there is no one size fits all formula for development success and that developing countries must take the lead in designing and implementing development strategies tailored to their individual need and circumstances†. The topic of whether democracy and autocracy is more appropriate for growth has received a lot of attention lately. This paper will examine five papers as examples of the current state of knowledge. Wilkin (2011) provides several definitions of good governance that he use in his paper. The World Bank defines governance is the process and institutions through which  decisions are made and authority in a country is exercised. Wilkin uses the governance metric offered by the Worldwide Governance Indicators Project. The indicators are grouped into six categories that are a useful guide to the dimensions of governance quality as it is generally conceived: (1) voice and accountability (2) political stability and absence of violent, (3) government effectiveness, (4) regulatory quality, (5) rule of law and (6) control of corruption. According to this metric, Wilkin point out that China continues to perform poorly on most of these indicators, ranking near or below the 50th percentile of countries assessed, while nonetheless achieving one of the fastest income growth rates of any country in the world. The reason that oligarchies in these countries can be beneficial to development is that they produce consistent policy choices. There are many developing countries that have achieved brief spurts of rapid per capita income growth – in fact, Wilkin specifies that, more than 130 countries have experienced annual per capita income growth of 6% or more for five or more of the years between 1950 and 2007. The challenge is not to achieve growth of 6% or more for a few years, which is unremarkable, but to do so for decades. This produces exponential rates of development, doubling the population’s average income roughly every 12 years. To attain this kind of consistency, oligarchy or authoritarian governance is useful and highly effective. Rodan and Jayasuriya (2009) focus their paper on the transition process and how capitalism developed in several Asian countries. They compare several regimes types across Southeast Asia and how the transition affect economic performance. The authors argue that a transition in Singapore from â€Å"competitive authoritarianism† to a more genuinely competitive political system requires a transformation in the political economy that suppresses bases for independent political organization. Meanwhile, political parties in post-authoritarian regimes in Thailand, Philippines and Indonesia do not operate quite as their counterparts historically have in earlier industrializing countries – not simply because of deficient institutions but because of the structural constraints on labor, social justice groups and other actors in civil society. Chin-en Wu (2012) raise the question of â€Å"whether democracy or autocracy is better for economic performance?† By incorporating both institutional  factors and structural incentives into his model, he find that the relative strength of political regimes in steering economic development is conditional on structural factors, which exert greater influence in autocracies than in democracies. For instance, when confronting external challenges, increasing national wealth becomes the most effective way for authoritarian leaders to reduce survival risk. Development provides incumbent governments with sufficient financial resources, which can finance the states apparatuses, including the bureaucracy and coercive forces such as the military and police. Failure to cope with external threats could result in seceding territories and damaging domestic support, both increasing the probability of losing power. Given the unfavorable structural condition, i.e., low levels of external threats of abundant resources wealth, dictators have weak incentives to implement growth-supporting policies. In a democracies, by contrast, the presences of democratic institutions induces political leaders to deliver public goods and partially substitute the role of structural factors. Conversely, where structural factors are conducive to growth, democracies do not necessarily outperform autocracies and may even grow at a slower rate because the flaw that are inherent in this system. Folch (2007) wrote a paper about the potential punishment under dictatorship. This paper explores whether the probability of being punished after losing power leads dictator to restrain their level of predation and, thus, increase economic growth. Holding dictators accountable is a difficulty problem, but under certain circumstances it might well improve their policy choices. Folch prove that dictators’ post tenure fate plays a key role in determining their level of graft and, hence, their economic performance. The logic Folch provide is quite simple, if dictators expect that after losing or giving up power they will be able to enjoy their booty in pleasant exile or in their own countries, their level of rent-extraction will be higher and this will lead growth rate to shrink. On the contrary, if the probability of being punished is high enough, dictators will constrain their greed and economic performance will improve. To confirm his theory, the author employ a simple model of predatory rule, and the consequences of increasing probability of punishment after losing power is explored. The  probability of punishment is proven to have a positive and significant effect on the rate of growth of GDP and alternative specification of growth regressions. Pitlik’s paper (2008) put an emphasis on the impact of growth performance on economic policy liberalization. He rejects the benefit of authoritarian regimes. In his paper, he investigates empirically the interaction between economic growth performance and political institutions in producing free-market reform. Using the data of up to 120 countries over the period of 1970-2004, Pitlik shows that political regime types systematically shape government policy responses to economic growth performance. In line with several other contributions, the author finds that democratic rule is favorable for reform in general. Contrary to conventional wisdom, he argues Economic policy reform is a conflict-ridden political process. Policies beneficial for society as a whole are often not implemented due to a fierce opposition from politically powerful prospective losers from reforms. In this respect, it is often claimed that a very poor economic performance can help overcome resistance to economic policy liberalization. Furthermore, political authorities not constrained by democratic checks and balances are often supposed to be more decisive and thus expected to carry out market-friendly policy change in times of crises more easily. Later, Pitlik concludes that there is no need for autocratic rule to implement economic policy reform in times of crises. Democracies not only carry out more liberal economic policies in general, but they are also more responsive to economic growth crises. Barro (1996) did a throughout research on determinate of growth in his paper. First variable he analyzed is the convergence of economies. He pointed out that, based on the neoclassical growth model developed by Ramsey (1928), Solow (1956), Swan (1956), Cass (1965) the lower the starting level of real per capita gross domestic product (GDP) the higher is the predicted growth rate. That is, if all economies were intrinsically the same, except for their starting capital intensities, then convergence could apply in an absolute sense; in other words, poor countries would tend to grow faster per capita than rich ones. However, if economies differ in various respects –  including propensities to save and have children, willingness to work, access to technologies, and government policies- then the convergence force applies only in a conditional sense. He conclude that, the growth rate should be higher if the starting per capita GDP is low in relation to is long-run or steady-state p osition; that is, if an economy begins far below its own target positon. He gives an example of a poor country that also has a low steady-state position – possibly because its public policies are harmful or its saving rate is low- would not tend to grow rapidly. Barro also made a very important contribution in analyzing the interplay between economic and political development. He shares the same idea with Friedman (1962) that the two â€Å"political freedom and economic freedom are mutually reinforcing†. Though, he stressed on the growth retarding aspects of democracy: The tendency to enact rich-to-poor redistributions of income. Authoritarian regimes may partially avoid these drawbacks of democracy. Moreover, nothing in principle prevents non-democratic governments from maintaining economic freedom and private property rights. A dictator does not have to engage in central planning, he said. Some examples of autocracies that have expanded economic freedoms include the Pinochet government of Chile, the Fujimore administration in Peru, the Shah’s regime in Iran and several current governments in East Asia. Schwarz (1992) observed that most OECD countries began their modern economic development in system with limited political rights and became full-fledged representative democracies only much later. Barro concludes that an increase in political rights tends to enhance growth and investment because the benefit from limitations on governmental power is the key matter. But in places that have already achieved a moderate amount of democracy, a further increase in political rights impairs growth and investment because the dominant effect comes from the intensified concern with income redistribution. Lipset (1959)’s paper focuses on the relationship between propensity and democracy. He apparently prefers to view it as the Aristotle hypothesis: â€Å"From Aristotle down to the present, men have argued that only in a wealthy society in which relatively few citizens lived in real poverty could a situation exist in which the mass of the population could intelligently participate in politics and could develop the self-restraint necessary to  avoid succumbing to the appeals of irresponsible demagogues†. Lipset emphasized increased education and an enlarged middle class as elements that expand â€Å"receptivity to democratic political tolerance norms†. Therefore, he conclude that for a country to maintain democracy regime, it is necessary to attain a certain level of education and prosperity. Otherwise, forcing democracy without its prerequisite would lead to reduction in growth rate and political instability. Cheibub (1998) also studies the relationship between political regimes and particular aspect of economic performance. Specifically, it addresses the question of whether regime type, classified as democracy or dictatorship, has a causal impact on the extractive capacity of government, as measured by the level of taxes it collects. The findings reported in his paper are unambiguous: there are no grounds for believing that democracies are less capable of collecting taxes than dictatorships. Although taxes are higher in democracies than in dictatorship, we should not infer that this is due to any inherent feature of democratic regimes. Once we control for the conditions that make us observe countries as one regime type or the other, and conjure up counterfactuals in which countries experiences conditions that are identical in every respect except for their political regime, we observe that the difference in level of taxes between the two regimes disappears. It is not that the two regimes do not matter for taxation. Even though taxation under democracies and dictatorships is influenced by broadly similar factors, there are also notable differences from one regime to the other. Per capita income, however, affects taxation only in democracies, whereas the pressure of servicing foreign debts only affects the level of taxes in dictatorships. Therefore, although there are factors that influence differently the level of taxes collected by the government in each regime, regime type does not affect the overall level of taxation. Democracies are not any less capable than dictatorship of extracting taxes from society.

Management Theory and Practice - 943 Words

According to Brech, E.F.L. (1965), Organisation – the Framework of Management (2nd edition) Longman, described organisation as ‘the framework of the management process’. If planning is considered as providing the route map for the journey, then organising is the means by which you arrive at your chosen destination. Organising is a process for determining, grouping and structuring of activities, devising and allocating roles arising from the grouping and structuring of activities, assigning accountability for results, determining detailed rules and systems of working, including those for communication, decision-making and conflict-resolution. The role of manager in organisation are to organise, to planning, to controlling in every aspect†¦show more content†¦Technology developments are taking place at such a fast pace today that yesterday’s technology becomes obsolete by tomorrow. This calls for a major structural and behavioural change in employees. Organisations have to continuously look for new ways to produce newer, cheaper and higher quality products than their competitors to succeed in international markets. When organisations in itiate change activities deliberately and consciously goals. It is known as planned change which is to enhance the ability of organisations to adapt themselves to the changes in the external environment and to change the behavior of employees. According to Lewin’s Three-step Model for approaches to managing organisation change, three steps to introduce permanent change which is unfreeze, movement to a new state and refreeze. The objective of organisation development is to improve the performance of individuals and groups in organisations. For the recruitment and selection, they mostly prefer taking new employees from junior level (minimum of leaving certificate level). 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