Effective protection of health and safety in the workplace, ensuring productive work, high life quality and expectancy, are among the basic human rights. In the Russian Federation, the enforcement of this right is related to serious difficulties. Despite the constant production upgrading, the share of enterprises of groups II and III of sanitary and epidemiological welfare, where the majority of jobs do not meet the requirements of sanitary and epidemiological standards and rules, amounted to 72.53 % in 2018.1
In the structure of harmful industrial factors that caused the development of occupational pathology in 2018, the hard labour ranks second (24.73 %), after the consequences of physical factors (49.85 %) 1. Hard labour is known to describe the degree of load on the musculoskeletal system and functional systems of the body that ensure its activity [1]. The hard labour exceeding the permissible parameters is typical for working professions in mining, metallurgy, mechanical engineering, construction industry, agriculture, and transport. In the Arctic Zone of the Russian Federation (AZRF), the borders of which are defined by Presidential Decree No. 296 of May 2, 2014 2 (the version of June 27, 2017), the enterprises that extract and process natural resources play the leading part in the economy. Their employees are at an increased risk of developing occupational pathology, being exposed to a set of harmful production factors, including increased hardness of the labour process [2–5].
A special feature of working in the Arctic is the impact on employees of inclement climatic conditions that reduce the adaptive capabilities of the body («Northern stress») [6] and thus increase the risk of adverse effects of harmful production factors [7–9]. With limited labour resources, the development of occupational pathology and the subsequent premature termination of their work by employees are additional difficulties for the economic development of the region [10, 11]. In this regard, preserving the health of the working population is a priority task of state policy in the Russian Arctic.3 One of its solutions may be to study the features of the development and prevention of occupational pathology under the influence of increased hard labour in the Arctic climate.