Can anyone on this site provide us with an example of this actually occurring - ie. where a contractor spends the time necessary to thoroughly & properly train and work with his crew to improve safety.
I can provide some numbers for my own camp at Folklore. I went back five years and found the pre-season course organizer spreadsheet. I then blanked out all the names and replaced with their positions within the camp. Also deleted a lot of other stuff from the spreadsheet, like course locations, times, class sizes, all that sort of stuff that isn't relevant. The resulting excerpt is posted below.
Note that the year that I chose was before Folklore increased the minimum guidelines for training within the camps. Now, there is a higher number of planters required on each crew to be "qualified backups" for three key areas: ATV use, Driver training, and Level 1 first aid. Essentially, we're now at the point where on each six-person crew, a minimum of two people (foreman and at least one planter) must have driver training, ATV training, and OFA1. On the bigger crews of over six, that number increases to three for ATV & OFA1, and four for drivers (to account for long drivers and tired drivers). Add to this that there need to be three more planters (minimum) in camp, above and beyond the above per-crew numbers, with the same courses. Add to that the fact that every single supervisor, foreman, checker, and cook needs to have the training. So in the end, in a camp of fifty-odd people, there usually 20+ people with all of these courses.
There are a lot of other courses (not all listed on the graphic below) that are required for various management personnel (myself, foremen, checkers, cooks). Some of the courses in this list are: TDG (everyone), S-100 fire suppression, Danger Tree Assessor, chain saw training, BCTS EMS training, various supervisory and liability/risk management courses, etc. And we also usually have six (minimum) Level 3 OFA's in camp.
Folklore covers the cost of all courses. They also pay daily Living Out allowances for the days when the workers are in courses, to help subsidize the cost of food and motels that they have to cover when showing up several days before the season starts. On top of that, they also pay out various per diem accounts for people with the some of the higher level courses who are officially responsible for overseeing and managing certain parts of ongoing operations (ie. OFA's and a few other positions).
Without having seen any accounting summaries of the training costs in a particular season, I do know what the approximate tuitions are for most of these courses, and my guess is that annual training costs for my camp alone are probably in the range of $40,000 to $60,000 for a single summer. Multiply that by five camps, and you're starting to talk about some real money.
And this isn't just a focus on Folklore. Sure, they are intensely concerned about safety of the planters, but I wouldn't say that other similar large companies don't do the same thing. You're going to see roughly the same commitment at many of the large companies like Brinkman, Summit, Spectrum, etc. etc. Many of the large companies are also starting to take initiatives to use technology to try to help monitoring driving, which in my mind is the biggest problem in the industry by far. Things like GPS devices in the entire fleet that can be monitored through satellite and email/text alerts by the head office, and dashboard cameras. Several companies have already implemented these technologies to varying degrees (GPS especially, and dash cams are just becoming of interest).
So going back to one of the original points where a camp culture that blatantly disregarded safety was brought up, I think that in some cases the companies are providing the tools but the problem is in the camp and crew management, setting bad examples. I obviously have a very compartmentalized view of the industry because I've only worked at half a dozen different companies over the past five years, and I'm trying to get insights from talking to other planters, which again can be biased. But my feeling right now is that the biggest problem is in the mid-management layers. I acknowledge that this could be incorrect. I sometimes wish that I could have as broad a view of the industry as someone like Jordan who has audited dozens of companies and thousands of planters.
Also, it's hard to have this discussion when the differences between companies can be so significant, especially when trying to compare larger Interior operations with smaller Coastal outfits. And also comparing apples to oranges when you're comparing companies where the majority of planters have 8+ seasons of experience to ones with significant numbers of planters having less than four years of experience. Those companies with heavy experience factors may not do a lot of training because they assume (usually correctly) that a fair number of their workers have had this type of training in the past at other companies. But maybe that's a weakness. A lot of training courses should be repeated every couple years so you don't forget the content and the lessons.
When looking at the list below, remember that this is just "additional" training needed for that season, and doesn't include courses that the individuals would have taken in past seasons. A full summary of all training including past courses for the group below would be about twice as long.
