Fishy business. The Social Impact of SST.pdf - Act Now!

six hundred women wearing green plastic aprons, hair nets and white gum boots as they skin,loin and shrink-wrap great mounds of tuna. Striding up and down the aisles between them arePNG team leaders wearing special caps and barking orders under the general din, while afemale Filipinno supervisor makes wider rounds. It is a rude sight, all the Sepik ladies standingin for their Marshall Island or Samoan counterparts in similar South Pacific factories. It’s hardto call the step from thatch house on the river to this cavern of sunless barehanded piece-work aform of ‘progress,’ but this is ‘development’ as it stands for women in Wewak today.In an adjoining hall the whole fish arrive to be butchered and made ready to freeze, by a maleand female team of eight or ten workers who chop and stack the fish onto rolling shelves. Rightbeside them lies well in the floor called the ‘sump,’ where guts, blood and offal float in a putridsoup of water, the ground zero of all the factory’s stench. Standing near the sump, which is onlyfeet away from the butchery line and open to the entire production level, one can easilyunderstand the claims of workers vomiting on a daily basis when they start working at thefactory.There is an in-house clinic for minor cuts and bruises, the most severe of which are sent hometo heal. And in another section, fish bones and wastes become chicken feed cereal for saleoverseas and some sites in PNG. The freezers are vast stadiums of cold smoke, and workers rollthe high stacks of lions in and out. They begin and end their shifts by punching a time clock,and the skinning and loining women areThe factory is very clean and orderdly, especially as compared to RD Tuna’s facilities inMadang. Toilet and locker rooms for men and women, well-swept cement floors and efficientventilation all make this a more humane workplace by far than the RD plant. But the smell isthe same: an unsupportably nauseating stench that surrounds employees at all productionstations, but it filtered out by air conditioning in the administration block.This smell comes from the ‘state of the art’ treatment plant, which provides for separatesedimentation and oxidation of the fish and human wastes, after which they are mixed anddisposed of at sea. This is the cause of the terrible smell.96