Increased Accident Rates during long overtime.

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barclayd

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Does anybody have any documented information about the effect of working long overtime hours on worker safety & increased accident rates?
Have googled a few, but could use some more.
thanks
db
 
I have heard that working over 10 hrs in a day causes productivity to decrease drasticly down to about 50%. But I have no facts to back that up.
 
barclayd said:
Does anybody have any documented information about the effect of working long overtime hours on worker safety & increased accident rates?
Have googled a few, but could use some more.
thanks
db
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What do you have so far? What do you need in addition? Economist websites should have graphs for this so that CEOs can dial up how much productivity they get vs. the likelihood of an accident for which they get sued.

Related to this is "dead peasant's insurance". It's a disincentive for companies to provide safe work environments.
 
I have information about this in my books I studied for my degree, though I would have to dig them out to look.

I can tell you though fatigue most certainly effects everything from safety to production in a negative way.

We started tracking workers overtime whenever they were injured not to long ago (LONG overdue), but I don't have enough data to prove yay or nay. Definitely a contributing factor though.
 
What time frame? 10 hours? 12?14? 20? Big differences, 14 hours is where the rates make a huge spike. I used to have a ton of this data when I did safety training but don't have it anymore. But a search of the BLS site will have everything you want.
 
Thanks for all your help. I have found a UK study, and a 2005 paper by some UMass Professors. Thanks for the BLS tip - looks promising. I'm looking for any increased chances of injury or equipment damage due to possible 'judgement errors' after working 12-14 hours.
thanks
db
 
Sometimes it depends on "the politics of the money". Worked on a fire alarm system for four months at a pump station (big one) and my billing was 91 hours a week (7/13's) and the crew of ten was 7/12's. No injuries.

NECA has a good report on the effects of overtime.
 
Our local POCO used to be able to work their crews 36 hours, but I heard recently that it's changed to 24 hours. You might be able to get some info from you local POCO.

I used to find that at about 10-12 hours, depending on various things, I would start getting goofy and that was usually a good time for a dinner break. After that I would usually catch a second wind and be ok for about 4-5 more hours.
 
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It's not such an easy question to answer.

Google "Fatigue and accident rates" and you'll get many answers- yet even the best admit that it's difficult to define, let alone measure, fatigue. A very large share of the links look at fatigue in terms of traffic accidents.

It's quite hard to really nail the topic down. Ultimately, it comes back to the old dispute whether "behavioral sciences" are science at all. Yet, there's no denying the anecdotal evidence. There's also no denying that outside factors can alter the feeling of fatigue- at least for awhile.

I've seen far too many suffer from trying to do just ONE more for the Gipper .... and, without a doubt, the bad decisions came from bad judgement ... which leads me to conclude that judgement is the first thing to be affected by fatigue.
 
Re long hours

Re long hours

Google "Who needs sleep?" This is a documentary about sleep deprivation in the motion picture industry and by extension the medical profession and any one else who works long hours.

I can personally testify that Hollywood is the only place I have ever worked where a vice president of operations walked by technicians stretched out on the floor , sound asleep and didn't say a word. (They were 26 hours into what was shaping up to be a 46 hour DAY)
 
Did an emergency repair on my submarine once back in the Navy days, took us 74 hours, no naps, straight through. Had the Engineer bringing us cofee and cookies to keep us going. We were not sane at the end.
 
zog said:
Did an emergency repair on my submarine once back in the Navy days, took us 74 hours, no naps, straight through. Had the Engineer bringing us cofee and cookies to keep us going. We were not sane at the end.
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The danger on extremely long halls like that comes from whats called "microsleep" where you actually go to sleep for 1-2 seconds at a time. The kind of grind Zog is talking about can actually cause halucinations like seeing disney characters peep around the switchgear...Not that I would know from experience but people talk you read things:)
 
gaffer15 said:
The danger on extremely long halls like that comes from whats called "microsleep" where you actually go to sleep for 1-2 seconds at a time. The kind of grind Zog is talking about can actually cause halucinations like seeing disney characters peep around the switchgear...Not that I would know from experience but people talk you read things:)
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Yeah I was seeing some stuff, we attached a micrometer to the wrong part of the MG to run out the bearing we replaced, we put it on the spinning part, when we fired it up the micrometer spun with the MG and we laughed for about 20 minutes, we were losing it.

We all recieved commendation letters, all the lobster we wanted for dinner, and 24 hours off to sleep.
 
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