Assessment of ergonomic risks and staff schedule: an application for women workers in the textile industry

The textiles sector is one of Turkey's most important and advanced sectors. It is of great importance in terms of exports, manufacturing industry, share in industrial production, investment, employment, gross domestic product, foreign exchange input. The largest concentration of employees in this sector, which plays a key role in Turkey's economy especially is women working in the sewing department. Ergonomic risks are emerging as the most important factor to be addressed in ensuring occupational health and safety in this area where the dependency on people continues, and labor-intensive production is present. Ergonomics, which is a part of occupational health and safety policies, should be seen as an investment, and the quality of welfare at work should be increased. This thesis, it is aimed to identify the occupational ergonomic risks faced by women in a textile factory in Yozgat and present solutions. Within the scope of this target, three applications were made in the study. In the first application, the ordering of risks in textile factories where ergonomic risks are intense is considered as a decision-making problem. While making the risk ranking, six main criteria, 37 sub-criteria, and six alternatives have were determined. In the problem discussed, criteria weights were determined with the ANP method, which is one of the multi-criteria decision-making problems, and the alternatives were sorted with the PROMETHEE method. In the second application is the ranking of the criteria weights of the ergonomic risks of women working in the sewing department, the most critical production stage of the factory, using the ANP method In the third application, the ergonomic physical strains of the employees in each task were calculated using the REBA method, and the number of minutes the employees will work at which job was determined by creating a mathematical model with goal programming. With this study, widespread awareness of ergonomics will reduce occupational health and safety problems as well as contribute to the reduction of workplace costs and losses.