Table 2.

Participant quotes regarding worker training

• “When I do the trainings, it’s mainly picture-based. More pictures than words, so that when I go through the [presentation], everybody understands. Then we do a lot of hands-on training. If its blood-borne pathogens training, I have people come up and put on all the equipment — the face mask and all that — so they can see how they put it on. They practice it and then we do games afterwards to make sure they understand the information and to reiterate that training.”

• “There’s a lot of value in using visuals, but there’s also a lot of room for misunderstanding when all you’re using is pictures. I’ve worked in a number of multicultural businesses, and in my experience, translators — particularly company employees — are not always reliable. You get a lot of nodding, ‘Yes, I understand,’ and there really isn’t the comprehension that you need.”

• “When that first bag of fish arrives, those new crewmembers have somebody with them and are shown the job step-by-step, until they’re ready to say, ‘Okay I can do this now.’”

• “We rely heavily on a simple risk assessment, which is … [a] template that workers will rely upon to go through a checklist that has five steps to identify risks and potential controls that they execute in a habitual manner. Five is a good number because that’s how many fingers you have on your hand. And we want everybody to keep all their fingers. They get used to counting it off on their fingers.”

• “Everybody is responsible for not only their own personal safety, but the safety of those around them, and for the conditions that we work in. I try to emphasize in our training and face-to-face sessions that we’re each responsible for our environment. If you see something, don’t just say something, but do something about it.”

• “If we’re in full production it’s hard to pull people away from the lines to provide training. Now, if we’re not producing fish, then they’re not here. I can’t provide the training if they’re not here.”