III. Primary Ports: Community Studies
D. New Bedford Go to map of ports
D1. Overview of New Bedford Groundfishing (Table 13)
D2. Port Infrastructure and Demographic Information on New Bedford/Fairhaven (Table 14)
D3. Fishing Organizations and Associations
D4. Social Dimensions of the MGF in New Bedford/Fairhaven
D5. Adaptations and Adjustments to Crisis
New Bedford is a long, narrow working class city
built from south to north along New Bedford Harbor, facing the city of
Fairhaven across the water. Its waterfront constitutes the city's
industrial fringe, providing dock space at several clustered, crowded locations
for what is arguably the largest fishing fleet in the Eastern United States,
if not in terms of numbers of vessels then certainly in terms of the tonnage
of those vessels, the numbers of people employed in fishing and fishing-related
industries, and their capacity to land fish and shellfish. Along with scallops,
groundfish are the fleet's primary target species.
Of all major groundfishing ports in the eastern
United States, the wider community of New Bedford is probably the most
dependent on the MGF as its economic heart and soul. Not only does
New Bedford trace its history directly to a fishing past, beginning as
a whaling center and evolving into the dynamic industrial scalloping and
dragging fisheries of today, as the manufacturing base of New Bedford erodes
away, the fisheries remain one of the few potentially high-income pursuits
available.
Under the current economic conditions, New Bedford's
attempts to promote heritage tourism seem like a somewhat cynical assertion
that the city was far more important as a center of commerce in the past
than it is today. Its heritage as a whaling center--nicknamed Whaling
City a center of manufacturing built up around textile and clothing mills,
and as a tolerant northern city known for harboring fugitive slaves prior
to the Civil War is chronicled in the halls of museums and around the city's
streets on visitor walking tours. Physical remnants of this past poke through
the streets with artifacts as humble as cobblestones and as towering as
museums and merchant houses that provisioned ships with supplies for long
excursions at sea.
Social and cultural remnants of that past appear
in the chipped wooden whales lining building facades and the faded insignias
of labor unions that dominated the city earlier this century. About
New Bedford Melville wrote, "But think not that this famous town has
only harpooners, cannibals, and bumpkins to show her visitors. Not at all.
Still, New Bedford is a queer place. Had it not been for us whalemen, that
tract of land would this day perhaps have been in as howling conditions
as the coast of Labrador....In New Bedford, fathers, they say, give whales
for dowers to their daughters, and portion off their nieces with a few
porpoises a-piece" (1851: 40).
Imagining that past is no more difficult than
moving from pier to pier along New Bedford Harbor, where a sizable groundfish
and scalloping fleet has replaced the whalers, or watching striking workers
picket Cliftex Corporation over managers' refusals to increases workers'
wages. From Fairhaven, across New Bedford Harbor, the city skyline
boasts an impressive array of smokestacks that, unfortunately, project
skyward from closed and boarded-up factories. Although living reminders
of the heritage of fishing and manufacturing abound in New Bedford, signs
of working class decline are equally evident. These range from the devastating
superfund clean-up site on the northern edge of town to the disconcerting
legacy of 52 sunken, sold, burned, dispossessed, and outlawed vessels that
have exited groundfishing since 1984, and the 31 scallop vessels similarly
cut from the fleet.
Struggling to hang onto their legacy, ground fishers
and unionized, blue collar workers find themselves in similar straights:
both have witnessed the erosion of their ways of life over the past
two decades and both have been chagrined by political and economic developments
in Massachusetts that favor high-tech, entrepreneurial job growth and turn
their backs on blue collar, local, traditional occupations. The Massachusetts
economy has succumbed to the lures of globalization and an ever expanding
service sector capable of providing little more than minimum wage jobs.
In New Bedford, among the more trenchant reminders of this hae been the
repeated attempts to build on the empty promises of the state lottery by
admitting a casino into the city.
Globalization in New Bedford has paved the way
for the loss of blue collar jobs to cheaper overseas production sites,
for the growing reliance on imported seafood, and for the increasing presence
of foreign labor in the processing plants.
Ironically, many New Bedford fishers have been
involved in global politics for generations. Two transnational communities
make up a sizeable portion of the fishing fleets that fish out of New Bedford:
Norwegians and Portuguese. Another, smaller group of fishermen come from
Nova Scotia.
Most important in the groundfishing industry are
the Portuguese, who come from mainland and island territories of Portugal,
including Cape Verde and the Azores. They arrived in several waves
through the 19th and 20th centuries and have established an ethnic enclave
in which knowledge of English is no more a necessary prerequisite to survival
than it is among Cubans in Miami or Puerto Ricans in Spanish Harlem (Baganha
1991).
Strong ties to Portuguese villages still exist,
making the community transnational in the textbook sense of the word, comprised
of "processes by which immigrants forge and sustain multi-stranded
social relations that link together their societies of origin and settlement"
(Basch, Glick-Schiller, and Szanton Blanc 1995: 7). Among the New Bedford
Portuguese, these social relations are based first in family and second
in village or region of origin, keeping the community in New Bedford alive
with the images and cultural paraphernalia of Portugal. Even second generation
Portuguese, born in the United States, express allegiance to Portugal rather
than the United States. A boat-owner who was closely knit into the Portuguese
community of New Bedford, in response to a question about her nationality,
said, "Well, I consider myself Portuguese. My mother was born American,
first generation; I'm second generation. I'm first generation through my
father. I'm Portuguese; I'm not American, I'm Portuguese."
The strength of the Portuguese community, similar
to the Italian community in Gloucester and the Norwegians in New Bedford/Fairhaven,
was noted by Doeringer, Moss, and Terkla in their mid-1980s study of New
England's fishing economy (1986), serving as an important predictive variable
for many of the same behaviors we witness in the fishery today.
How Portuguese fishers adapt to the current crisis and future regulations
derives in part from the collective funds we refer to as social capital,
which Doeringer, et al. called "family capital," and in part
from their membership in a community that spans two and sometimes more
than two nations.
The
blue collar character of the city is reflected in the area's labor force
statistics, with persons employed as "operators, fabricators, and
laborers" rivaling those who have streamed into the "technical,
sales, and administrative support" category.
These figures, based on the US census, underestimate
the numbers of the New Bedford/ Fairhaven fishers by about 50 percent,
presumably because they include information only from fishers who live
within New Bedford city limits and leaving out those who live in surrounding
communities yet fish out of New Bedford. Nearby Taunton, for example,
has its own sizeable Portuguese community, and a sizeable portion of the
fleet is based across the harbor from New Bedford, in Fairhaven. More accurate
counts of fishers and vessels come from local observers.
New
Bedford's waterfront looks like an industrial port. A small fleet of recreational
crafts tie up at the marina on Pope's Island, between New Bedford and Fairhaven,
but along both the New Bedford and Fairhaven waterfronts, 80' to 100' vessels
tie up, three deep, at between 15 and 20 locations up and down the harbor.
Although a handful of smaller (45' to 70') vessels tie up among
or nearby the larger vessels, New Bedford's fleet is clearly dominated
by the larger vessels. Estimates of the fleet's size are as indicated in
Table 14.
These figures are not too different from other
recent estimates drawn from direct field observations rather than from
licensing data. McCay, et al. (1993: 143), for example, stated that,
"There are approximately 300 boats in New Bedford. Thirty to 40 are
small draggers in the 45-65 foot range, 120 are large draggers in the 75-85
foot range, and 150 are scallopers in the 75-85 foot range."
These vessels employ around 2,000 fishers; the
dragging fleet, by itself, employs somewhere between 600 and 1,200 fishers,
as groundfishing vessel crews range in size from three to six individuals.
Crew size on both scallop and groundfishing vessels has shrunk in
the past few years, in part because of the crisis and in part due to regulations
designed to curb fishing effort. Some captains and boat owners have adopted
crew rotation schedules--a variant of job-sharing--instead of laying off
crew.
While many vessels are owner operated, there still
remains a contingent of non-operator vessel owners within the New Bedford
fishery that marshal fleets, hiring captains and crew. These individuals
set some of the rules that govern labor relations throughout New Bedford,
negotiating vessel shares and hiring practices, but union representatives
we spoke with in New Bedford reported that payment systems and crew-captain
relations vary widely from vessel to vessel. In the late 1980s, boat owners
who fell into this category numbered 32; typically, these owners owned
anywhere from one or two to six or seven vessels. As a sign that vessel
owners' powers are increasing, during the strike of 1986 the union argued
for a 42-58 percent split in profits, with 42 percent going to the owners,
and owners desired a 49-51 percent split. A decade after the strike, the
split on union vessels is 46-54 percent, with the owners receiving 46 percent.
In addition to boat owners, captains, and crew,
the full New Bedford/ Fairhaven fleet generates business for around 75
seafood processors and wholesale fish dealers and 200 other shoreside industries.
Together, these businesses provide employment for around 6,000 to 8,000
additional workers.
The above figures, of course, include only those
individuals employed directly in fishing and fishing-related industries;
missing from these numbers are the health providers, real estate companies,
banks, insurance agencies, and small business people who rely on the families
of fishing industry employees for a percentage of their business. Even
without considering these individuals, between five and eight percent of
the people in the New Bedford SMSA (Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area)
--far higher when we include members of their families--receive their livelihood
primarily from fishing. Even a conservative estimate, assuming two other
individuals supported by each fisher and fishing-related worker employed,
places the proportion of the population dependent on fishing at between
11 percent and 18 percent.
The support industries that fishers we interviewed
mentioned most often as directly dependent on the industry were fuel, ice,
and food/supplies. During a major fishers' strike of 1985-86, newspaper
coverage focused on the plight of fishery-related businesses within the
first two weeks of the strike, suggesting the effects of reduced fishing
are felt immediately and deeply along the waterfront. A single vessel's
trip supplies were listed as including, "40 dozen eggs, 20 steaks,
20 pounds of bacon, 10 gallons of orange juice, 18 gallons of milk, and
37 loaves of bread" (Sunday-Times, January 5, 1986: A1). A company
supplying 45 vessels lost a quarter of a million dollars before the strike
was 10 days old, and laid off 22 employees. Besides food suppliers, other
businesses affected immediately were welders, restaurants, ice companies,
fish wholesalers and processors, and dock workers. Fishers we interviewed
for this study commented that the current downturn in fisheries had had
ripple effects through the support sector as well. According to one:
"Well, what has happened is I have a welder
that does most of my work, and he's an individual--once in a while he'll
have a helper, but most of the time this guy works for himself by
himself. When money gets tight with me, I can weld myself and I
can work on the boat. So that saves me a couple of hundred dollars, but
it also takes a couple hundred out of his pocket. So a lot of things that
you used to pay someone to do, we do ourselves. It's a ripple effect; as
soon as you don't have the money to pay for your services, you stop getting
them. And with the more time that the boat now has to stay ashore, if I'm
going to be home for a week, I can spend one day or two working on the
boat."
Another put it more succinctly, saying, "Fishermen
invest in a lot of money in the community, so there's a whole industry
prepared for them, like ice, fuel, food, clothing, the restaurants. They
like to go out and drink and eat and socialize" (translated and
paraphrased by research assistant).
These observations reflect the official positions
of the city fathers. In 1986, the head of the Greater New Bedford
Chamber of Commerce claimed that the strike was costing the metropolis
over $1,000,000 per day and that, "For every dollar paid to a fisherman,
$4 to $4.50 circulates through the local economy." In 1992, before
the current fishing crisis, the average annual income for a fisher in New
Bedford was $36,534. Unfortunately, New Bedford/ Fairhaven catch revenues
declined from $151,300,000 to $107,500,000 between 1992 and 1993.
The close ties between the city and the fleet
are both visible and invisible, material and symbolic. When vessels
come ashore, captains and crew join service personnel to repair the routine
wear and damage of sailing. Seafood wholesale and processing companies
come alive with the catch. Trucks wait in the parking lots. Beside them,
at nine, noon, and three, carts sell sandwiches and sodas to the cutters
and lumpers. During the 1985-86 strike, 115 members of the Fish Lumpers
Union sat idle while vessels remained ashore or began fishing out of Provincetown.
New Bedford now has a fish auction modeled after
the Portland Display Auction, but many vessels remain obligated to seafood
dealers and processors by virtue of credit relations or access to docking
space. The New Bedford Seafood Coalition cited the auction as one
of the "positive notes" in recent times, saying, "The privately
operated Display Auction has attracted a wider range of fish buyers which
are seeking a wider range of fish other than the traditional species of
fin fish and flounders. Among those species are hake, cat fish, cusk, mud
skate wings, halibut, fluke, mackerel, red fish, and blue fish" (New
Bedford Seafood Coalition, 1996).
Relations among boat owners, captains, and seafood
merchants are highly varied and often fraught with suspicion and hostility.
Most fishers reported that the 1980s strike signaled the end of a long
era of fairly cooperative relations. Within the fleet, divisions exist
between vessels, between scallopers and draggers, between fleets based
on docking locations, and between different ethnic groups. The Portuguese
tend to concentrate on draggers, although this was more the case in the
past than today, and some Portuguese have switched from dragging to scalloping.
Switching of this nature is possible, but costly. According to one fisher
who had made this switch:
"My first three boats were draggers, and
the boat that I now have is a combination dragger/scalloper. We're
scalloping right now; we've been scalloping since 1987. I was dragging
from '74 to '87. In that period of time, I went scalloping on occasion;
I went for a few months on two separate occasions. In '87 I changed to
go scalloping. Draggers weren't making any money... I figured I would go
back and I've been at it ever since. Now it's like flipping a coin to see
who has the best deal, you know, because the draggers and scallopers are
both struggling.... I could go dragging, but it's cost-prohibitive to change
back and forth. You're talking $30,000 or $35,000 every time you change,
so you can't do that if the give you 50 days to drag. It isn't worthwhile."
These comments and the lack of switching among
different fisheries in New Bedford reflect the degree to which the fleets
have become specialized, a common characteristics of large-vessel fleets.
This specialization is not confined to fishing alone but spills
over into the support sectors and labor relations on vessels as well, making
adjustments to changes in the industry more difficult than in other ports,
such as Point Judith and Chatham, where fishers engage in more generalized
fishing strategies. The history of the union presence in New Bedford has
regimented labor-management relations in ways that govern crew recruitment
and policies aboard vessels, although it was widely reported that the late
1980s strike, chronicled briefly below, shifted power away from the union
and thereby deregulated, to some degree, labor relations in the community
and aboard vessels.
As one of the oldest ports in New England, with
its strong ethnic enclaves, organizations and associations serving the
New Bedford/Fairhaven fishing fleet are both numerous, multi-faceted, and
often well-developed in terms of political sophistication and their abilities
to lobby, formally and informally, on behalf of their members. In
keeping with the area's blue-collar, working class character, an estimated
600 captains and crew were represented by the Seafarers' International
Union during the 1986 strike, as well as the 115 represented by the Fish
Lumpers Union mentioned above, but these numbers have declined over the
past few years, due to both the general declines in union membership throughout
the United States and the difficulties of the fishing industry under conditions
of declining stocks. Currently, the Seafarers Union represented 350 fishermen,
or around 42% fewer than they represented only 10 years ago. Weakening
of unions is occurring throughout New Bedford, in fishing related industries
as well as on the vessels and in the ailing textile mills. A fuel barge
operator's wife succinctly described the common union-busting practice
of closing a union shop and reopening it with a new name yet without a
union, saying, "His [her husband's] place of employment used to
be called one thing on a Friday under a union contract; the following Monday
they opened up with another name without a union contract, a cut in pay,
loss of a pension plan, loss of medical benefits, loss of four weeks' vacation,
loss of sick days... The union that the old place used to be represented
by was notified and this was over a year ago and nothing has been done
by them."
New Bedford unions, historically, provided pension
funds for fishers, negotiated share systems with boat owners, and regulated
labor relations on board vessels as well as governed crew recruitment,
retention, and hiring and firing policies. With the decline of unions,
most of the fishers we interviewed for this study desired more effective
representation of the fishing industry, in their relations with boat owners
and seafood dealers and with the federal government. Increasingly, of course,
the federal government is viewed as the major threat to their future as
fishers. The following statement, from a boat owner who is also married
to a fisher, captures the spirit of how fishers view their interactions
and history with the federal government, and such feelings guide their
political behaviors:
"As far as I'm concerned, the American
government are assholes. We wanted regulations 15 years ago--15
years ago--to manage the fishery and they said, "No need." Now,
a fisherman is a hunter. When you ask to be regulated, there's something
wrong. But when they say "No," you just do it. And they just
let us go, just let us build more boats and more boats and bigger boats
and better boats. And now that the stocks are very low, now they're trying
to force 15 years of regulations in two years. And they kill us. If they'd
listened to us right in the beginning, and regulated us when we asked
15 years ago, we could live with this regulation and that regulation and
just work it within our schedule. You cannot compact something in two years.
"We suffered, but we could adapt to it
[Amendment 5]. We could adapt to it. It was very, very stringent,
but we could adapt. But now with Amendment 7, they're going to take the
200 days that we had to make us fish 139 days of the year. It's like you
working--you work-- could you survive, without your parents, just you alone,
working 139 days a year? And next year is going to be 88 days.
"They know that regulation is needed,
but not like this. They knew this 15 years ago, and we went to the
government and told them, 'You have to stop this, you have to close off
that area because of juvenile fish species,' and they wouldn't listen because
there was no need. So now all of a sudden, they're being threatened with
a law suit and it's like, 'We have to do it now.' So 15 years of concern,
they're trying to jam-pack, like I said, in three years. They're not going
to do it. We'll never survive."
Recently, as in other ports, the fishing crisis
has spawned increased organizational activity among fishers. One
organization attempting to represent more fishers and to establish linkages
with other Massachusetts fishers' organizations is the New Bedford Seafood
Coalition, whose activities include providing technical advice to government
and industry, monitoring regulatory developments, communicating with the
media about fishing issues, and drawing together fishing organizations
throughout New England. The difficulties these and other organizations
have in a place like New Bedford is that the loyalties of fishers there
run in other directions, away from a unified front and toward the isolationism
of the ethnic enclave.
Strong associations have always been associated
with ethnic enclaves in the United States, and the Portuguese and Norwegians
in New Bedford are no exceptions to this. Historically, ethnic associations
in the United States have spawned insurance coverage programs, access to
credit, and social clubs, often building centers of cultural activity,
financing churches, and providing social networks for job leads, temporary
or permanent housing, and other forms of assistance.
In New Bedford, a Cape Verde Cultural Center and
an Immigrant Assistance Center provide some limited services to the Portuguese.
The Assistance Center provides translation services in particular, while
the Cape Verde center promotes Portuguese cultural education within the
public schools, attempting to enhance the status of Portuguese among school
children and instill pride in Portuguese youth. As noted above, many second
generation Portuguese have been so thoroughly enculturated in Portuguese
language and culture that they do not consider themselves Americans. The
enclave has fostered several Portuguese restaurants, taverns, food stores,
and other businesses that cater solely or primarily to other Portuguese.
The New Bedford telephone directory lists the following local Portuguese
clubs:
Monte Pio Luzo Americano Corp
New Cape Verdean Band Club
Portuguese American Athletic Club
Portuguese American Social Club
Portuguese Continental Union
Portuguese Sports Club
Young Cape Verdeans Athletic Club
One of our informants described the Portuguese
community rather well, saying:
"All day they are dealing with Portuguese
people, so they never really have to learn the language. So
because of that, they never learn the language, because they deal with
Portuguese people, they go to stores and they speak Portuguese, they go
to the doctor's and they speak Portuguese. So because everything is handed
to them in Portuguese, they never really have to go and learn English.....
Go to the stores around here, the fish markets, the Portuguese variety
stores, you go to the doctor's, you go to Social Security, you go to Welfare--I
can guarantee you there are people that are employed in these agencies
that speak Portuguese. So why learn? Not only that, we're talking about
the elderly, we're talking about people that have no education in Portugal...
They are illiterate, they don't even know how to write their names; they
do a little cross. That's how--they do a cross instead of signing their
names. So if they're illiterate, they're never going to learn the language,
so it's very tough for them. They can't read and write in their own language,
never mind coming into the United States and learning how to read and write
English; that's unheard of, and they don't.... The New Bedford Welfare
Office, they have people that speak Portuguese. Social Security, they have
people that speak Portuguese. You go to doctors, there are certain doctors
that speak Portuguese. You go to banks. There's even a community bank that
is Portuguese. So we are in the heart of the Portuguese community--agencies,
stores around here, they all speak Portuguese. So because of that, people
don't feel like they need to speak English, which they don't."
The Norwegians formed a more tightly knit ethnic
enclave in the past than today. Their community in New Bedford drew
most of its original membership from a single island in Norway (Karmøy
Island), and was built around fishing. Early fishers, arriving around the
turn of the century, established the New Bedford Fish Supply, which still
operates and which used to support newly arriving fishers by providing
them credit (without interest) and outfitting their boats. This practice
ended during the 1960s, when immigration from Northern Europe became more
regulated, particularly after the 1965 Immigration Act.
Unlike the Portuguese, the most recent Norwegian
generation has fewer concrete ties to Norway and does not express the allegiance
we so often associate with transnationalism. The Norwegians have
established a church, which, along what an organization called the Friends
of Norway, still serves as the cultural heart of the community, although
there are no obviously Norwegian clubs listed in the telephone directory.
The strength of ethnicity as an organizing principle
in New Bedford contributes to the conflicts that exist within the port,
between fleets and between different participants in the industry, as well
as undermines the abilities of New Bedford fishers to organize a unified
challenge to Amendment 7 or other regulations. The Portuguese in
particular have tended to withdraw more deeply into their enclave as the
crisis deepens, considering returning to Portugal as a viable response
to economic dislocation and resisting institutional attempts to draw them
into the wider economy through retraining. As evidence of this, our Portuguese
field assistant translated, paraphrased, and summarized the words of three
fishers she interviews as follows:
Fisherman # 1: He
says with this crisis he might return to Portugal, because there's nothing
for him to get him attached here. He
says his English is worse, because when you arrive in New Bedford, you
lose your English because everybody speaks Portuguese.... He said they
haven't heard anything, they haven't been informed officially, or have
not informed about the new legislation, although they are aware of it...
There should be an entity there to retrain Portuguese fishermen, which
there is not. He said there should be support for new jobs; there should
be employment assistance and social assistance for free. They say that
they don't know English, they're not privileged with a lot of assistance
that comes because they're not aware. He says Portuguese are too much preoccupied
with their own nose and they don't care on getting united and trying to
solve their problem. He says they think little, they just think on themselves.
And they've got to get united to solve all this situation, they would be
better off.
Fisherman # 2: He
stays out from the government, it's all a lie. Who's going
to get the most advantage are the people who are not in the fishing. The
fisherman per se is not going to get anything.... These laws are not for
the fishermen, not even for the boat-owners. It's for people that have
never been in the fishing, like all those programs for retraining. If you
look at them and see who the people in front of them, most of them were
not fishermen. And he says it's not that he's 47 years old, almost 48,
that he's going to learn construction. There's no work for construction.
Maybe 2 percent of the new fishermen, of the young fishermen, maybe they
can retrained. But in his age, and also there is a language problem.
Fisherman # 3: About
the retraining programs, he thinks that the money is just for some people
to make money, and not for the real fishermen. Because these associations
do not give to the fishermen, because you have to be unemployed to be retrained
and then there's the language problem... But how can you be totally unemployed
if your wife cannot supply [income]? That's a big stress at his age. What
can he do? He's 56 years old learning English.
The common method of bringing new fishers into
a fishery through family relations or long apprenticeship-like training
regimens is, in New Bedford's groundfishing industry, reinforced by the
heavy ethnic, transnational component to the fisheries. This is
true of groundfishing more than scalloping, since Portuguese dominate the
groundfishing industry and have constructed a more intricate ethnic enclave
than the Norwegians. Yet both the Portuguese and the Norwegians in New
Bedford have built their communities in concert with the growth of occupational
communities based on fishing, and both communities have drawn on fishing
communities in Portugal and Norway for crew during times of industry expansion.
Because of their close ties to fishing communities
in the Azores and Cape Verde, crew recruitment has an international dimension
among the Portuguese, making apprenticeships on vessels less necessary
than in other ports. While this practice allows the fleet to expand
during times of economic growth, the reverse is less common. That is, new
immigrants and their families can become entrenched in the Portuguese community
of New Bedford relatively quickly. Although most state that they will deal
with the current crisis by returning to Portugal, others point out barriers
to this response:
"A lot of the [Portuguese] men think the
same way I do, but their wives don't want to leave their children.
Their children get married here and have children--grandchildren--and they
don't want to leave. See, I'm not like that. My children are my children
because I gave birth to them, but I do not own them. My life is with my
husband. I started and hopefully I'll end with him. My children have their
own lives. I'll help them as much as I can--live for them, no, because
they wouldn't live for me. They're going to live for their own selves,
their own lives. And I may do the same thing. And a lot of Portuguese I
know, they won't leave because of the children and grandchildren."
Above we mentioned that the early Norwegian arrivals
relied on the New Bedford Fish Supply to outfit them and provide them with
crew jobs and credit to buy and put to sea their own vessels. This
practice has been common among the Portuguese as well, and endured to just
before the current crisis. According to the wife of a Portuguese fisher,
newly arriving Portuguese fishers routinely attached themselves as crew
on Portuguese owned vessels, and sometimes acquired vessels with the help
of Portuguese fish buyers or boat owners. Under these conditions, however,
it was not uncommon for the established Portuguese to retain up to 50 percent
ownership of the vessel, even after the debt was repaid. During the process
of repaying the loan or working for other Portuguese as crew, however,
local observers reported again and again that conditions for crew could
be harsh, bordering on cruelty. Yet complaints are uncommon, in part because
the tight connections between New Bedford and small villages in Portugal
would result in shame for the complaining party. Again, these mixtures
of benevolence and cruelty, enforced via gossip and shame from the home
community, are common features of transnational communities.
Relations between Portuguese crew and Portuguese
boat owners reflect one dimension of the Portuguese community that has
been observed particularly among peoples who compete over what they perceive
as scarce resources. While the New Bedford Portuguese tend to be
extremely closed to outsiders and densely knit in terms of community rituals,
kinship ties, and so forth, several sources of friction exist within the
community, making it difficult for them to organize or engage in effective
political activity. Interviews with the wives of Portuguese fishers referred
many times to problems of families envying one another and constantly competing
to own nicer cars, houses, clothes, and so forth:
"You cannot get the wives involved, they just don't want to. They'd rather sit in the cafe and talk about this one's daughter and that one's son--anything but worry about their own financial future. Portuguese women are terrible, terrible. They're nasty. You'd think that they would be involved in what's going on. As far as Portuguese fishermen--that's what I'm talking about--Portuguese fishermen will come in and give their wives their check. That check, she takes care of, she's got to feed this and that and everything else. I guarantee that check is not the same as it was five years ago; it's less. I would want to be involved. They don't; they sit down, they crochet, they gossip like hell about this one's life and that one's life, and this husband putting the horns on somebody else*--and they don't care about what's happening to them."
*Note by Clay: "Putting horns on somebody else" means having an affair with an another woman.
Another woman, her comments translated and paraphrased,
said something like: "She doesn't belong to any fishing support
groups within the community. She pretty much has a life of
her own, very closed. She says yes, sometimes fishermen help each other,
but they feel a lot of jealousy and envy when they talk, like between the
families and the wives, there's a lot of competition, like 'my house is
better, my car's better, my clothes are better,' and so forth."
Similar comments were elicited from a Norwegian
woman. Summarized, she expressed the idea that, although the Norwegian
community presents a very organized ethnic appearance, there are strong
undercurrents of greed and envy working against effective unification.
This woman added that it was better to conduct business outside the family,
without infusing one's business activity with a strong ethnic component,
suggesting that with family ties also came patriarchal and authoritarian
relations.
These observations of Portuguese and Norwegians
about their own ethnicity reflect the ambivalence that often characterizes
membership in a strong ethnic community in the United States. One
of the Portuguese we interviewed expressed rather well the feeling of straddling
two cultures in New Bedford, saying,
"As far as perceiving myself, I was 11
when I came to this country, I went to school here. My very good
friends were born in the United States, my daughter was born here, I do
a lot of American things. But at the same time, I'm really torn in-between.
I go to Portugal and I feel very Portuguese. I'm in the United States,
and when I'm dealing with the Portuguese, I feel very Portuguese. When
I'm dealing with the Americans--when I go to school or something like that--I
feel very American. But I don't know. I'm half and half.... I know the
[Portuguese] community very well. I know a lot of people that are also
in the same situation; they help the community in general. And yeah, I
am very much aware--very much aware of the problems and very much aware
of what is going on in the community. We have to be in order to help people."
On the one hand, members of such communities spend
a great deal of time and energy securing jobs, housing, and other forms
of assistance for new arrivals and for those most severely affected by
downturns in economic activity. These behaviors, however, draw on
collective funds and often need to be enforced, subtly or overtly, through
meaningful social ties and appeals to shared cultural symbols of sharing
and cooperation. During times of economic plenty, when everyone's vessel
shares are increasing, enforcing these behaviors may not be necessary;
when vessel shares begin to shrink, enforcing sharing and cooperation becomes
more and more necessary and increasingly difficult. Under these conditions,
we should not be too surprised to find envy and gossip emerging within
the community and dividing families from one another.
Specific responses to the current crisis have
been less varied in New Bedford than in the other ports. Movement
into alternative fisheries is somewhat rarer here than, for example, among
those Portland fishers who have begun gearing up for shrimping. We noted
earlier that the New Bedford fleet is highly specialized. While this seems
accurate for most vessels, participation in alternative fisheries is not
unheard of. A study conducted in 1992-93 (McCay, et al. 1993) suggested
that some New Bedford fishers were experienced in the squid, dogfish, butterfish,
and whiting fisheries, and many of the fishers have increased their efforts
toward monkfish, shifting away from the mainstays of yellowtail flounder,
winter flounder, and cod. We can expect these behaviors to increase with
further restrictions on catch, although reductions in days at sea may result
in focusing fishing effort on those species with which the fishers are
most familiar.
We noted earlier that crew sizes have diminished
over the past few years, and that some vessels have instituted crew rotation
schemes. These seem to be typical responses to the fishery crisis,
in New Bedford and in the other ports. How often a crewman stays ashore
is directly related to how much his income drops, of course, so that a
crewman who has to sit out one out of every four trips, assuming catch
remains relatively constant, will see a one quarter drop in his income.
General responses to this and other crises give
little cause to expect that fishers here will emerge from this crisis more
adaptable or in a stronger position. New Bedford/ Fairhaven residents
displaced by the fishing crisis of the past two to three years have dealt
with and are dealing with the crisis in ways not uncommon among blue collar
workers and among members of transnational communities: predictably, those
without strong kinship or social network ties have turned to government
assistance, particularly unemployment compensation, as well as formal political
activity; those Portuguese who are part of the transnational community
have either returned to Portugal or have begun planning to return. In recent
history, the crisis most vivid in fishers' minds was the 1985-86 strike;
recounting the events of that struggle may provide some clues to the ways
that New Bedford fishers--particularly those without strong ties to ethnic
communities--will deal with the current crisis.
The strike began the day after Christmas in 1985,
during a slow fishing month, and involved somewhere between 65 and 100
vessels--the Seafarers' Union claimed to represent 100 vessels, the owners
claimed they were negotiating with only 65. One source of discrepancy
came from the fact that some non-union fishers joined the picket lines
in support of unionized fishers, showing the extent to which the fishing
identity influences behavior in a port like New Bedford. During the strike,
many non-unionized vessels left port and began landing their catches in
Boston and Provincetown (in part from fear unionized fishers would disable
them), exacerbating the strike's impact on local businesses and creating
the impression that more vessels were involved than actually were.
The strike centered on the relative shares of
the catch, trip expenses, the pension fund, and control over hiring and
firing practices aborad the vessels. Representing the draggers,
the union wanted a 42 percent-to-owners-58 percent-to-crew split in shares,
with owners covering trip expenses, or a 41 to 59 percent split if the
crew covered expenses. Owners wanted a 49 to 51 percent split if they had
to cover expenses, or a 47 to 53 percent split with crew covering expenses.
In addition, the union wanted to keep the pension fund, while the owners
wanted to distribute the then accumulated $13,000,000 to eligible fishers,
and abolish the fund. Finally, regarding crew hiring, owners wanted captains
to have the right to assemble their own crews while union representatives
wanted to establish a hiring hall, placing crew on vessels according to
seniority, experience, and skill.
More telling than the contractual dimensions of
the strike were the community responses, both inside and outside the fisheries.
While many of the businesses dependent on fishing simply desired
the strike to end, support for the union--the fishers themselves--was widespread.
As just noted, crew from non-unionized vessels showed their support of
unionized fishers by walking picket lines, vessels that continued to fishing
landed their catch and purchased their trip supplies elsewhere, and local
restaurants gave away free sandwiches, soup, and coffee to the striking
fishers. As the strike dragged on for ten day and then two weeks, New Bedfordians
began taking sides, dividing along predictable lines of power and class.
The mayor and police moved to protect vessels that continued to fish, dealers
and processors who continued to handle the catch, and suppliers who continued
to outfit crews for trips. Owners, owner-operators, and crew of non-unionized
vessels appeared to support the striking fishers early in the strike but
then resumed fishing after the strike was about two weeks old, sailing
with reduced crews but sailing nevertheless, and operating out of nearby
ports like Provincetown and Boston.
These behaviors suggest that while the spirits
of cooperation and unity pervade New Bedford, they quickly whither under
pressures to meet mortgage payments and pay bills. If crisis reveals
allegiance, it also reveals how shortlived is the effectiveness of mere
allegiance to guiding behavior. New Bedford simply cannot tolerate an idle
fleet for long.
A crisis of the kind we are witnessing in the
MGF, piecemeal in character and thus distinct from the community's experience
with the strike, may prolong the spirit of allegiance over a long enough
time period to identify coping strategies and strengths in the community's
stores of welfare and assistance. Already the Immigrant Assistance
Center has expanded its services and identified new sources of assistance
to help fishers through the crisis, although the most common response reported
to us was not so much dealing with the crisis as fleeing it. Those fishers
who have not considered moving or have not already moved back to Portugal
have considered or begun migrating into new areas and new waters, predominantly
into the southern range of the MGF (to Cape Hatteras) and into the South
Atlantic. These areas, of course, have begun tightening up their fishing
regulations as this occurs.
In their observations in New Bedford around a
decade ago, Doeringer, Moss, and Terkla claimed that "kinship vessels"
(primarily Portuguese groundfishing vessels) in New Bedford could weather
economic downturns more easily and for longer time periods than capitalist
vessels, adopting
measures such as rotating crews instead of simply laying off crew and,
by such means, spreading the effects of the crisis over a large population,
sharing the misery as much as they share the successes of profitable fishing
seasons.
The negative side of this practice was that one's
ties to the local society and Portuguese enclave were extremely tight.
Consequently, those most severely affected by downturns in the fisheries
were unwilling to migrate to more robust economic growth centers than those
whose ties to the local area are fewer and weaker in nature. Referring
to both the Italian fleet in Gloucester and the Portuguese fleet in New
Bedford, Doeringer, Moss, and Terkla expressed this as follows: "Economic
and kinship factors strongly tie workers in the fishing industry to their
communities and therefore adjustment processes tend to be unusually localized."
While this may have been true ten years ago, among
the Portuguese fishermen of today, one commonly stated response to the
current crisis is to move, or at least consider moving, back to Portugal.
This may be one of the only options for those who lack skills in English
or other appropriate labor market skills, as the following boat owner's
quote suggests:
"And you know I really feel bad for my
Portuguese fishermen.... The ones I've known since I was small, my father's
friends, the ones I went to school with, the ones that are my husband's
friends--they're my Portuguese fishermen. I feel bad for them, because
their language is unreal. You don't understand. Portuguese fishermen deal
in a Portuguese society. They go fishing with Portuguese. The come home,
in the house is all Portuguese. They go to Portuguese cafes, Portuguese
restaurants, Portuguese bakeries, radios, television, newspapers, all Portuguese.
They're not exposed to American, to English."
New Bedford's fishing fleet--consisting primarily
of large vessels that are highly specialized in either groundfishing or
scalloping--is the community most heavily dependent on the MGF along the
Atlantic Coast. As New Bedford's manufacturing sector declines,
groundfishing has assumed even more importance as one of the few occupational
alternatives remaining in the city for individuals with little education
but willing to work hard as apprentice fishers aboard vessels. Unlike the
other ports, reproducing the fishery in New Bedford will be less difficult
because fresh, willing crew are readily available within the Portuguese
transnational community as long as the industry remains viable.
The port's transnationalism dimension and the propensity of the Portuguese to deal with difficulty by migrating are two of the port's more resilient features, yet a large withdrawal of Portuguese fishermen from New Bedford would cut into the community's economy quite deeply. Fishers in New Bedford have weathered challenges in the past, yet seem to have emerged from them weaker in terms of unity and cooperation. The fleet remains active and large, somewhat intractable, only gradually expanding into new fisheries or new economic activities. How deep and how long a decline in fish stocks would have to run, or how restrictive regulations would have to become to dismantle the social, cultural, and physical infrastructure of New Bedford, however, is something we are not likely to learn during the current crisis.