Ke\'~~'()rds: Low-back disorder: Trunk motion: Lifting; Surveillance: Lumbar motion monitor (LMM): Turnover. Passive surveillance techniques which rely only on injury reponing to locate ergonomic problems within a facility may not be sensitive enough to identify alljobs that place a worker at risk oflow back disorder. The current study examines whether turnover rate data provide useful input to a passive surveillance approach. It is hypothesized that the turnover of employees through individual

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... jobs, when not attributable to differential pay scales within a facility, is likely to indicate the presence of ergonomic hazards ass()Ciated with low back cumulative trauma disorders. This study used the database and multiple logistic regression model developed by Marras et lIl. ( 1993) to evaluate this hypothesis. Two data sets were evaluated with the model to determine whether jobs with turnover resemble those with a high historical risk of LB-CTD. The first data set contained trunk motion and workplace data from jobs in which there had been turnover but there were no incidents of LB-CTD. When comparing these data to truly low risk jobs (no LB-CTD incidents or turnover), the model yielded an odds ratio of 5.2. This moderate odds ratio indicates that many of the jobs with turnover have characteristics similar to those found in high LB-CTD risk jobs. The second data set included jobs with turnover and moderate LB-CTD incident rates. The model's resulting odds ratio of 11.0 indicates that jobs with moderate incident rates and turnover are very similar to jobs with a high LB-CTD risk. These results suggest that passive surveillance programs would be more sensitive if turnover rates were determined for each job within a facility and were used to supplement incident rate data.