She also sees that the quality talk isn’t matched by follow-through and consistent efforts on the floor.

I worked on the floor and you don’t see meetings, you don’t see the Investors in People, you don’t see personnel, you don’t see anything, you just see the daily, daily thing that you’re doing, and if you can’t see anything changing then you don’t think anything’s being done because no body could even care less…You get a team brief, but it’s the consistency and the continuity, it doesn’t follow through like it should do.

Finally, in her role as a trainer, the safety representative recognizes the mismatch between what’s written in a manual and how the work actually gets done.

I’ve always said to people I wouldn’t ask you to do it if I couldn’t do it myself, so I was very reluctant to train out something that I didn’t know nothing about and I came up against it in the next shift. …I tried to train a guy up on what they call a ‘kibbler,’ it’s a machine that mixes, and I’m trying to explain to him that you have to do this and you have to do that and he said to me, ‘Do you know anything about kibble?’ I said, ‘No, I don’t, I only handle health and safety, but this is what it says,’ and he says, ‘Oh, that’s all right on paper.’

Literacy is a Social Practice

As the safety representative’s transcript shows, she has severe problems with the way she is required to train people. She believes that talking about the work, and building trust and rapport is an important aspect of training, and she is aware that manuals may differ from what people actually need to do.

I get into an awful lot of trouble for stopping and talking to people. You haven’t got time to do that. …I’m educating them to come, to get… my way… across to them, not that I change their minds but I might just put a little seed of doubt in their minds, and they’ll think well she might be right, we’ll give it a try.

In another example, Maureen and Patsy, both operatives, are now in charge of writing operating manuals for the whole plant. They succeeded in their interviews for these jobs because another operative took confidential copies of the job descriptions to them well before the interview.

She told me when the job will be advertised on the notice board so all the paperwork she got on the training co-ordinator she gave me, whether she was suppose to or not I don’t know, but it was like inside information for me. So I read through it all, basically knew what they were going to ask questions about.