Table 4.

Participant quotes regarding application of ergonomic principles

• “We’re trying to develop strategies for dealing with these muscle strains and sprains but it’s a tough nut to crack. They’re very complicated.”

• “When you’re only running for two months, it’s tough to justify spending half a million dollars on some machine that’s going to automatically palletize something. [...]Certainly you want to protect your employees. But if this half million dollars is not going to get paid back for 20 years, well, then you find a different way to do it that maybe isn’t as effective.”

• “We took a broader look at it to see what we could do, hired an ergonomic consultant, and redesigned the [vessel’s] whole bagging area. We blew out a wall and put in conveyor belts and squeezers to help eliminate the lifting hazards. Before, the crew were lifting a bag, which might weigh 77 pounds apiece, seven times. They do roughly 6,000 bags per trip. Now they are only lifting a bag to stack it, put it on the conveyor belt, and then offload it. So we eliminated four of the seven lifts.”

• “Depending on the crewmember, most could handle [lifting the screw press] on their own, but some are smaller and are unable to do that. They decided that regardless of a person’s size, that it’s a two-person job, period. The smaller or less strong individual has the assistance necessary and it’s taken care of so it won’t cause a problem.”

• “All of these older boats were conversions - they were built to be something else; most of them were not purpose-built to be at-sea processors. So, as we purpose-build fishing vessels and design them the right way to do business from the front end, I think it’s going to make some big, dramatic improvements. Safety through design is a challenge with older boats. Let’s do it smarter, do it right the first time, so we build it safely for the people that are using it, and mitigate hazards through elimination rather than administrative controls.”