Artesanía de Galicia - POTSFINK

we have been denouncing in the OPeirao Federation and through theassociations themselves, becausethis is very harmful to us in manyways. On the one hand you haveno work, because they only giveyou work when the others havetoo much. When there is no oneto turn to they decide to cometo us who are legalised. Most ofthe time this is what happens, becauseit is much easier for the intermediaryto take the work to a house where,besides the woman, the children work orother people who work with them.What percentage of people who devote themselves tomaking and repairing nets work in an irregular manner?According to a study made by the Industry Commission a year ago,in Galicia there are over two thousand people doing this work,but registered is only seven hundred are registered. That meanswe have sixty-five percent infiltrations. We are mainly talking aboutpensioners, but a person who is seventy or eighty finds it difficultto work. There are fishermen who retire before reaching sixty anddecide to play cards in the afternoon and spend the morning workingon the nets. The fishermen have a lot of experience and can helpthe net-makers, guiding them in their work, but they are workingagainst us, competing with us. We had the opportunity to travel tothe Basque Country, where we met other net-makers from the wholeof the Cantabrian coast. We saw that they needed the help of theretired people, people with experience, and when they need themthey called them and they were there.Why does precisely the opposite happen in Galicia?The ports most affected by this situation in Galicia are Guarda,Malpica and Ribeira. It is precisely where the chandlers are, whogive work to the intermediaries. The latter prefer to give the workout to the houses, rather than to the professionals, whereas in theother areas, where they work directly with the ship owners, illegallabour doesn’t exist.Is your salary suited to the work you do?What isn’t normal is that we have a day’s work of eight, twelve orthirteen hours in order to earn a salary that is below the minimumwage. Now we are trying to unify the salaries in the different portsin Galicia. The work is the same in the different areas, but the paymentvaries from place to place.How did you start working on the nets?I did a lot of different things before I became a net-maker. I studieduntil I was nineteen. I took a course in administration, but I preferredto devote myself to my house. When I saw that the children weretwelve or thirteen and could look after themselves I started workingin agriculture, and one day, by chance, an intermediary offeredme a job working on repairing nets. I started doing it and liked it,but I never imagined financial independence. No matter how littleyou earn you see that you are contributing towards the house andthat made me feel good. At the end I decided to leave agricultureand I decided to get into this on a professional level. Fourteen yearsago.Is there enough work for the net-makers?There is a great deal of work. The problem is that it is badly dividedup. If they improved the conditions and we had a worthy salary thatpaid well for the day’s work then young people would get involvedin this. I’m involved in teaching this to young people so they canwork, but with a salary that allows them to live. The ones we aremaking now are in order to keep up our contributions, because atour age, between forty and fifty, there isn’t much more to turn to.In order to improve your situation you first have to getyour work to stop being anonymous. Is the Federationworking towards obtaining this recognition?We are managing the professional qualification of the net-makers,we are demanding that our work be recognised. In order to registeryou need a diploma, and that contributes towards people not doingit underground, because training is very important. The FisheriesCommission manages the courses through local guild associations,which is what we know, but we net-makers don’t belong to theseguilds, which are only for fishermen and people who extract thingsfrom the sea. That isn’t our case, because our work is only thatof making or maintaining the nets. We are independent from theguilds.It also depends on the Administration to obtain professionalrecognition.Yes. We achieved something from the Vice Presidency, which thisyear brought out the Arlinga programme. This accepts the net-makers,but can’t go any further, because the Vice Presidency has noauthority over the sea. In the Fisheries Commission, in training, wehave a hundred percent, but we still have to solve the problem ofunregistered workers.What can you do to end unfair competition?That’s in the hands of the Work Commission. They intend to dosomething, and they are seeing whether the Treasury Office cando something to get the underground economy up on the surface.They have to control it; there have to be receipts to prove where theboats get the material and who did the work. The situation is thatwe are a very pacific group and here everything works on the basisof struggle and war. Once we called a demonstration and after twodays we had an inspection in the ports. If we don’t do anything noone pays us any attention, and I believe that it’s also because weare women.The Indispensable HandIs there any industrial alternative to hand-made nets?It has been tried, but manual work always has to be there. It alsodepends on the nets. In the case of the frame in the past it was alldone with hemp and cotton string. Now these arrive and what thenet-maker does is to put them together or repair them. In the smallernets one used to work with the same strings and the women repairedthe nets, but now they come ready made. Our work consistsof linking them, tying one piece to another. In the case of the long28