Proposal of a method for the evaluation of the employment possibilities for people with special needs on woodworking machines

Abstract

The employment opportunities for people with special needs in the field of woodworking have not yet been mapped out in the Czech Republic. All the current experience in this area has been directly acquired from individual protected and socio-therapeutic workshops. As such, the research proposes a method for evaluating the employment opportunities for handicapped people when working on woodworking machines and this has become the main contribution of the thesis. The originality of the method consists in creating a questionnaire focused on the activity under examination which has been chronologically broken into individual sub-operations for which we have determined the degree of mastery and load rate for each worker. In case of failing to carry out a sub-operation, we have proposed possible measures to remove the barrier to enable the person to carry out the operation. A model of the method has been tested with one handicapped worker. The basis for the work involved mapping out 4 protected workshops currently involved in woodworking. The research was undertaken by means of a personal visit to each individual organization and via consultation both with the leaders and with handicapped workers. Experience has shown that appropriate work adaptation enables the production of complicated wooden products such as musical instruments. The proposed method specifies the work capacity of a particular person and technology on a particular piece of machinery when machining of a specific workpiece. As such, it ascertains the real causes of the barriers restricting handicapped people from performing the work and it should lead to the consideration and proposal of work conditions which compensate for a handicap so that a person with special needs can perform the work activity in consideration. The nature of the evaluation method means that it is suitable for protected workshops, socio-therapeutic workshops and organizations producing mass-produced products.