The Fatigue Myths That Keep Getting Warehouse Workers Hurt
A tired worker on a warehouse floor costs money before anyone gets hurt. Slower reactions. Missed labels. A forklift pallet set down half an inch too low. According to OSHA, accident and injury rates climb 18% during evening shifts and 30% during night shifts compared with day shifts, and 12-hour workdays are tied to a 37% jump in injury risk. Those numbers don't describe careless people. They describe brains that have been asked to do too much for too long. Warehouse work has become one of the more cognitively demanding jobs in the economy, and the way supervisors, insurers, and safety consultants talk about the accidents it produces hasn't caught up. Most of the received wisdom about fatigue on the floor is wrong in ways that protect the status quo. Here are the assumptions worth throwing out. Fatigue Is Not Just Being Sleepy The first mistake is treating fatigue as a synonym for drowsiness. Drowsiness is one symptom. The rest look nothing like a yawn: narrowed att...