Another Try for Tuna
It’s not exactly Cannery Row reborn, but tuna canning, a once-thriving industry that faded from the Los Angeles waterfront in the 1980s, has regained a slender hold in San Pedro.
Once again, boats are docking at Terminal Island to unload yellowfin and skipjack, and cans of tuna are rolling off the assembly lines at a cannery that reopened last month.
The same cannery closed under different ownership a year ago, no longer able to compete with overseas operations. But Joe Hamby, president of the new enterprise, says his company will find its niche by turning out cans of tuna under grocery store and other private labels much faster than foreign concerns.
“We can produce it and ship in a matter of days,” said Hamby, whose father and grandmother worked in the Terminal Island canneries.
The cannery buildings that sprawl over 10 acres next to Fish Harbor are giant reminders of an industry that was born in San Pedro in 1903 when A.P. Halfhill experimented with a canned version of what then was considered the lowly tuna. Taste tests of canned tuna at the Los Angeles County Fair in Pomona yielded such positive reviews that seven tuna canneries opened over the years around Fish Harbor. More eventually sprung up in San Diego.
For decades, thousands of workers came by ferry from San Pedro or by car over the Henry Ford Bridge to work in the canneries. They donned pristine white uniforms and worked long shifts in cavernous factories where the smell of fish invaded every pore of their bodies.
But the canneries--Starkist, Bumble Bee, Chicken of the Sea--gradually shut down in the late 1970s and early 1980s, leaving behind a ghost town of boxy buildings. The companies moved their operations to Puerto Rico and American Samoa, lured by tax incentives and low labor costs.
Pan Pacific Fisheries was the lone holdout, until it filed for bankruptcy protection last September.
Tri-Marine International, a tuna trading company in San Pedro, resuscitated the factory by paying $7.3 million in a bankruptcy auction for the cannery. It formed a partnership with Thai Union, a seafood canning business in Thailand, and Caribbean Marine, a group of tuna fishing vessels in San Diego, under the name of Tri-Union International.
The cannery, located at Cannery and Barracuda streets, sent out its first shipment of canned tuna last week for S&W; foods.
As Hamby briskly walks out of his office building toward the canning operations, he gets a strong whiff of fish. But Hamby doesn’t crinkle his nose. Instead, he smiles. “That’s the smell of money,” he says. Inside, women wearing white uniforms, white shoes and white hairnets stand in a long assembly line, deftly separating the red meat from the white meat. The lighter flakes of fish are whooshed along a conveyor belt and into metal cans that jangle down another belt from the second floor. The red meat will be canned into pet food.
All the cleaners are women who start work at 6 a.m. in a room the size of a football field. About 99% are Latinas who have spent years working on cannery assembly lines. There is Consuelo Rivera, 57, with 18 years as a cleaner. There is 31-year-old Guillermina Ramos, who worked 13 years cleaning fish for Pan Pacific before being hired by Tri-Union. And Maria Ortiz of Carson, who stands at a table in the lunchroom and notes in a loud voice that she worked for Pan Pacific for 21 years.
“We don’t really know anything else,” Ortiz says, noting that she’s happy to be earning money again but not too excited to once more be on her feet cleaning fish all day.
Outside, the 151-foot purse seiner Laurie Ann, owned by Anton Stanojevich, unloads its cargo of tuna caught after sailing for days off the California coast. Men in hard hats pull out the frozen fish stored below and load it into huge buckets that are weighed and stored in the cannery’s vast freezer. Later it will be cooked and steamed before it is cleaned.
“Our secret weapon is our own fish,” Hamby says.
Normally, he explains, these fishermen would have delivered their cargo to a fish trader, who probably would have sold it to Thailand, which would have canned it and sent it back to the U.S. Now, the fish are caught off the coast of California, delivered right to San Pedro, canned and shipped within the United States.
In its heyday, the tuna canning industry was a tightknit community that often employed several members of the same family. At one time, there were 10,000 people who worked in the canneries around Terminal Island.
Today there is only a relative handful of cannery workers--the 250 at Tri-Union. Most of them were hired from Pan Pacific after they took a 10% pay cut. The average tuna cleaner is paid $6 to $8 an hour.
Steve Edney, national director for United Industrial Workers, which represents the cannery employees, is delighted that the plant is operating again. “It was nip and tuck to save these jobs,” he said.
And Hamby, whose father worked at the cannery he is saving, takes pride in keeping a proud tradition alive. “I feel a huge obligation to make this work,” he said.
