The improvement of working and living environment of young workers is one of the essential requisite for welfare society. The betterment of living standard of workers, on the other hand, requires an increase in workers' productivities.
This study has two objectives. The primary objective is to investigate the relationships between the physical environment of female workers and their health status and productive potential (the major hypothesis). The secondary objective is to estimate the effect of taking iron supplements on the health status of the women employees who have been diagnosed as suffering from anemia in the health profile examinations (the sub-hypothesis).
Data on individual employees were collected by administering questionnaire to and medical examination of 396 female workers employed by the three companies in Kuro-dong Industrial Site in Seoul, Korea. Data on the physical environment of working places were collected by use of appropriate equipments borrowed from the Ministry of Labor.
Basically two lines of data analyses have been conducted:preliminary data descriptions, and statistical tests of the central hypothesis and sub-hypothesis of the study.
Descriptive analyses of the major variables were conducted by comparing frequency distributions of the variables for three companies. The significance of differences in those variables were examined by chi-square tests.
Two-stage least squares were the statistical model used for the multivariate analyses. At the first stage, intermediate output variables (health variables)were regressed on the input variables (environmental and situational variables); and at the second stage, final output variables (productivity measures), on the intermediate variables estimated by the first stage regressions and input variables.
For the intervention study, t-tests were conducted to examine if there exist significant differences in the intermediate and final output variables before and after the iron supplements are taken.
The results of the analyses confirmed the hypothesized cause-effect relationships between environment, health and productivity. It is revealed that the improvement of working and living environment of workers contributes to a better health and to a greater productive potential.
Implications of the findings are that the firms should invest more in improvement of working environment because such investment will increase productivities of workers and hence profit of the firm, and that the investment in the improvement of health of workers will be a sound investment on the same reason.
One of the typical nature of study such as this is that data consistency is hard to maintain. This is because samples must be selected so as to secure the respondents' cooperation. In addition, measurements of productivity and health status are very difficult. At best we did what we can with available data. However, in spite of data constraints, the hypotheses have been tested with rigorous statistical methods.
