The Hamburg Sewer Company (HSE) needs a lot of muscle power to maintain those pipes and manhole covers. Each of the manholes and covers has to be inspected for cracks or damage once a year.

On average, 50 to 80 of the covers, which weigh 95 kilos (209 lbs.) a piece, are lifted and inspected each day. Workers maneuver heavy, loud construction tools inside narrow, malodorous manholes to repair cracks. Even more arduous is clearing thousands of kilometers of storm drains and rain gutters using massive vacuum trucks. As workers age, the day-to-day demands of the job become more of a strain. “For a 30-year-old bodybuilder, this is no problem, but for older people it takes more of a toll on the body,” says University of Lüneburg industrial psychologist Friedrich Müller.

HAMBURG SEWER EXECUTIVES are concerned because they are experiencing a change in the demographics of the company’s workforce – a change that reflects, on a micro scale, what is going on all across Europe. In Hamburg, where the HSE employs roughly 1,300 people, the problem is stark: while the city’s population is expected to increase by 3% by 2030, the size of its potential workforce – essentially people between 15 and 64 – will simultaneously shrink by 3% as the population ages overall.

“The shrinking of working age populations will impose really severe restrictions on the entire economy,” says Thusnelda Tivig, head of the “Aging Workforce” department at the Rostock Center for the Study of Demographic Change.

IN AN ATTEMPT TO REDUCE THE PRESSURE, Germany recently increased its retirement age to 67. Some policy-makers have even suggested it should be raised higher than that. But solving the problem of an aging Europe is more complicated than shifting a number. As politicians and corporate decision-makers consider the consequences of aging populations, they need to take into account fundamental societal and personal issues. For example: If we are expected to work longer in life, does the nature of the work need to change to reflect the reality of the aging body?

It’s a question that occurred to HSE head Wolfgang Werner a few years ago. In the last decade, pressure to cut the payroll through attrition (as opposed to layoffs) meant that the sewer company stopped hiring new, younger employees. As a result, the average age of HSE workers is 49. To find the answer, HSE contacted Müller, who has been studying the issue for decades. Müller agreed to study Hamburg sanitation workers to explore the implications of the raised retirement age on workers involved in heavy manual labor.

Müller and his team of re-searchers conducted elaborate interviews with 64 HSE workers engaged in the most strenuous tasks to assess everything from changing into uniforms to lifting manhole covers with specially designed hooks. Next, to measure the stress and strain of the job, Müller used a battery of tools to evaluate the difficulty of the tasks, including old-fashioned surveys, high-tech heart-rate monitors and even a gadget that measured muscle tension near the spine. He also used a newly developed psychological technique called category partitioning, which measures perceived mental and physical strain of tasks.

His findings were surprising. Jobs which were assumed to be easier, like filling out paperwork and lifting covers, were rated more difficult. Also, it turned out, for example, that older workers used less energy and force lifting the covers. Veteran employees clearly had better technique than their younger colleagues, says Müller: “It simply comes with experience.” Younger workers found paperwork for reporting damage mentally stressful, while the older workers were used to the bureaucracy involved. Yet, not so surprising, “The more overweight they were, the more health problems they reported,” Müller says.

MÜLLER'S RECOMMENDATIONS ranged from better workflow to box lunches. To encourage workers to use ergonomic tools, he showed them data proving how much easier they made the job – and encouraged management to reward quality of technique rather than quantity of manhole covers lifted. “Older workers need different incentives and motivation,” Tivig says.

Müller suggested rotating workers to spread “best-practice” techniques among teams, serving low-fat meals in the canteen to help workers lose weight, and offering healthy packed lunches for those in the field. HSE executives had already made many of the study’s recommendations, but the data collected convinced workers to finally adopt the safer, more efficient techniques.

All companies will face the demographic shift, but it is understandable that few have had done so yet: today’s birth rate decline affects the workforce first in two decades, when most of today’s executives will be retired. “There are few developments in society as long-term as demography,” Tivig says. And yet there’s no doubt that the companies preparing well in advance will have an advantage when workforce trends really take effect. “It’s a huge problem right now. Some companies are aware of the issue, but most are not,” Müller says. “The HSE is way ahead of the game."

Published by PROJECT M in June 2009

(Photo: Frank May/dpaPicture Alliance)