Fish Factory

On another cold and dark autumn evening at Shipton Manor in Nottingham on the Hedges, I lowered my cold-to-the-bone body into a hot bath. Wafts of smoked-salmon steam lifted from the waterline. I was a lump of salmon meat in broth.

Closing my eyes and soaking, I saw whole salmon, sections of salmon and slices of salmon displayed on plastic trays with plastic sheets separating each slice of flesh. After an especially bad day, I not only saw smoked salmon, but smelt salmon roe boiling in the blackened steel tub which stood in the middle of the concrete factory floor; the roe’s rank fishy odour was worse than the general smoked salmon scent, for it more deeply infiltrated my olfactory system. I could taste it.

In the bath, no matter how much I scrubbed, the smell and trauma of mind-numbing repetitive smoked salmon packing actions and factory work remained. Even after a bath, Ellie and I smelt smoked salmon for it not only pervaded our minds, but exited our bodies as breath and sweat. The smoked salmon smell was a constant reminder of our predicament and frustration.

Every day finished with a ritualistic cleansing bath: a repetitive end to a repetitive day’s work we would repeat for the next ten weeks. Ten weeks equalled fifty days. Fifty days equalled four hundred hours packing smoked salmon sitting in an eight degrees Celsius white-walled fridge with no windows and unstimulating conversation, undertaking catatonia-inducing work.

Each day began by retrieving our salmon factory fishy clothes from the small cupboard next to the bathroom, clothes we stripped the previous evening the moment we entered the bedsit. After spraying our clothes with Febreze – a supposed odour eating product – we hung them outside on the washing line in the dark for an hour before stuffing them into a plastic bag stuffed into another plastic bag and sealed with a knot. It wasn’t possible to wash our clothes every day and to do so seemed pointless: the fish smell so deeply permeated our clothes and bodies that it never came out. Everything we touched smelt like fish.
We worked in a fridge with a glass viewing window from where visitors could look in at the factory, like we were subjects in a sociology study or participants in an experiment revisiting the Hawthorne Effect – a set of experiments in the nineteen twenties and thirties studying the effects of physical conditions on productivity where lighting conditions, working hours and rest breaks, amongst other things, were adjusted.

The purpose of the fish factory experiment, I surmised, was to test our fortitude at eight degrees Celsius, the threat of repetitive brain injury, the impact of constant subjection to smoked salmon stench, and for Ellie and me, to engage with other factory workers.

In the actual Hawthorne Effect studies, experimenters concluded it was not the changes in physical conditions affecting workers’ productivity, rather, the fact someone was concerned about their workplace and the opportunities this gave for workers to discuss changes before they took place¹.

Sitting in a fridge packing fish for eight hours a day, felt too cruel to be anything but a social experiment. Keeping my eyes on the glass viewing window looking for scientists with clipboards and intelligent faces, I took note of any conditions inside the factory seeming to change from day to day, waiting for my opportunity to give feedback. Only once did I see people at the window. The boss, Phillip, stared in with some Chinese-looking people who looked thoughtful and intelligent. But they weren’t carrying clipboards.

Like scientists, we wore white coats with hair nets, latex gloves and white gumboots. Underneath we layered thermals, sweatshirts, pants, a scarf, a woollen hat and woollen socks – sometimes two of some clothing items.

Ellie and I worked with two men and five women including a mother-daughter combo. The daughter, about thirty-five years old, was the manager; she told us when to take breaks and approved our salmon arranged-on-a-tray before vacuum packing. Quality control meant indicating if brown salmon meat needed to be removed from slices with scissors and if an under or overweight tray needed more or less salmon. There was obvious nepotism. The manager’s old mother was blind or indifferent because her trays of salmon, like her skin, were dotted with brown-flesh. The daughter would fix her mother’s mistakes and say nothing.

The two male staff kept to themselves.

A university student, Mr Stoned, worked facing a wall at the salmon-skinning-and-slicing machine. His five-minute job took five minutes to learn. He skinned and sliced salmon all day and never spoke to anyone – even at break times, instead standing around smoking away from the rest of the group.

The other male was a tall thin shy seventeen-year-old. He stood in a corner packing and sealing boxes of vacuum-packed smoked salmon before pushing the boxes down a conveyor belt for a young woman – who looked like a man – to collect and load in the delivery van she drove. We saw her intermittently and at break times.

Catherine, an English girl our age, started a couple of weeks after us. Also between jobs, Catherine was waiting to return to Italy to work school camps. The three of us would meet at a local pub to discuss badger spotting, the hideousness of our jobs and a better future. Over pints of lager, we hatched plans to bring down the salmon factory with the short-sighted benefit of saving everyone from having to go to work.

The last lady, in her forties, said, “I’ve been working here for eight years.” And I pushed the thought of her and everything she said from my mind. It strained my brain and hurt my emotions every time I tried to unravel how someone could work in a smoked salmon factory for eight years. Could someone conceivably like packing smoked salmon? Was I lacking in open mindedness? Why was I so bothered by and unable to comprehend eight years packing smoked salmon?

I started to ask my co-workers questions.

Around the cold stainless-steel packing table, refrigerator fans blowing at our necks giving Ellie daily headaches, we ladies sat together packing smoked salmon and the hours slowly passed. The oily smoked salmon transformed from whole dead fish to nicely-displayed-vacuum-packed dead fish on a tray and my innocent questions, perceived as stirring, had started to breed discontent. I was asking people working in a factory how they could do this job every day as if they had a choice. These were not questions, but thoughts seeding malcontent because I was too young to realise people get stuck in jobs, that some of us are cornered by our circumstances.

At the time, I couldn’t make sense of it, and it broke me.

“I’ve never seen anyone so upset. What’s wrong?”

“It’s just,” I blubbered. “These people… what’s wrong with them?”

The boss, Phillip, and I stood outside the fish factory in the low autumn sun. It had passed that time of year when autumn can be pretty, with orange and yellow autumn leaves, it was late season and the leafless trees hinted at deep winter. While other smoked salmon factory workers continued to pack and weigh thinly cut slithers of smoked salmon on trays, I was crying.

“How can people do this for a living? What’s wrong with them?”

I pleaded with Phillip for answers, having worked myself into a state.

Phillip mulled my question before drawing my attention to Mr Stoned who kept to himself at the salmon skinning-and-slicing machine.

“Bob is training to be a lawyer. Every holiday he comes here and he doesn’t seem to have a problem.”

I struggled to believe Phillip and I don’t think Phillip believed himself. I thought about Mr Stoned and his red eyes and undernourished frame. What Phillip couldn’t see was Mr Stoned had lost his will to live. He drugged himself to limp along. I don’t think he was a university student but someone who only worked a few weeks a year.

“It’s just so mind numbing. I don’t know how people can do this every day.”

My tears were pouring in an unselfconscious stream helping to relieve some of the frustration. “What’s wrong with them?”

Phillip couldn’t understand what I was saying; I had started to speak in that high-pitched hysterical voice people get when crying out of control. I was hyperventilating and repeating myself.

“What’s wrong with them?” I sobbed. I was crying for me and them and everyone.

Phillip could see I was inconsolable but wouldn’t give me the answer I knew he knew. He refused to say what was “wrong with them.”

It was then the butch lesbian who drove the Ford Transit delivery van pulled into the factory courtyard. We watched the van. At this moment it occurred to me, jobs of this nature – low paid and unskilled – were for the marginalised, uneducated, unskilled, freaks and those on the fringe. And here were Ellie and I: the foreign lesbian travellers.

Phillip owned the business, worked in the office, and managed the factory and people. He was not interested in discussing my questions concerning equality, access to opportunity, capitalism, society, meritocracy and healthy work environments. He was a man with solutions.

“You’re obviously quite upset,” he observed. “How about you go home for the rest of the day?”

He gave me a stare I didn’t understand. I felt like a child unable to connect with an adult, like I couldn’t find the words to communicate my needs.

“Perhaps a change of scenery is what you need,” suggested Phillip. “How about you come back tomorrow and work in the other factory, with Brent and Marshall? They manage the smokers and prepare the salmon.”

And so it was decided. I would come back tomorrow and a change of scenery would fix everything.

Ellie took me home. We dipped our bodies in the bath and made soup. It was week four of our ten-week contract.

Considering Brent and Marshall worked in a white-walled fridge without windows and had done so for the last two years, they were more optimistic than I could ever imagine being at any point in my life. They seemed like well-adjusted normal human beings considering they must have cut off tens of thousands of salmon heads and boiled thousands of salmon roes.

In my new role, I wore a chainmail glove and chopped heads and fins off freshly smoked salmon and boiled cods’ roe. The knives were big and sharp and for the first hour I was entertained, but after two days, the mental fatigue and emotional rot crept in. I was experiencing another kind of torture doing my brain a terrible disservice.

Half way through day one of my new role, I decided maybe it wasn’t the job, but me who was weak, and other smoked salmon factory workers were smarter and stronger than me. I had to figure out what they did to cope, and do that. I had to master repetition and break though the mental-pain barrier in order to form boredom-resistant methods or new neural pathways to help deal with the brain-numbing job.
I likened my strategy to going through the six stages of grief:
Denial – I can’t believe I work at a smoked salmon factory.
Isolation – Am I the only one who feels this way about packing salmon?
Anger – I can’t fucking believe I work here. I am such an idiot. I hate everything. I hate salmon.
Bargaining – If I cut the head off this smoked salmon perfectly, maybe the universe will never allow me to work in a job like this again.
Depression – Crying to the boss and struggling to get up in the morning, dreading wearing the fishy clothes.
Acceptance – I have only myself to blame. This is my life now. I work at a smoked salmon factory. I am at one with smoked salmon.

Meanwhile, back in the factory, the ladies asked Ellie about my move to the adjoining area and, after an additional week, about a rotting smell. Catherine and Ellie exchanged sideways glances. One of we three had stuffed a large chunk of smoked salmon deep into a factory pipe and, after a couple of weeks, the salmon flesh had started to rot. The stench increased daily.

The factory ladies thought it was me.

After two weeks in the windowless fridge I was barely keeping it together. Still in the “Depression” stage, I was desperate to reach “Acceptance.” And Ellie had started to crack. Experiencing “Anger,” every night she complained about her temperature-induced headaches.

Turning to alcohol, Catherine, Ellie and I met in the pub to drink and discuss the rotting smell and how getting the flesh out of the pipe without being seen was a near-impossible task. It had been pushed up the pipe too far.

The revolting boiling roe, the salmon heads on the floor, the freezing work conditions and our lobotomised factory co-workers who thought the job was excellent because it paid five pounds fifty an hour instead of the five pounds paid in other nearby factories, everything finally took its toll on our fragile psyches. The all too menial little, became the all too much. Ellie and I quit.

We staggered from our respective factories incoherent and drooling, barely managing to last seven weeks on the job.

The day we quit, Ellie and I drove home to our cosy bedsit for a bath, booked a last minute ten-day holiday to Rhodes, Greece, got into bed, and slept for two days then drove to the airport to escape darkness for sunshine.

We would worry about work when we returned.

After our holiday, we caught up with Catherine to discuss badgers, the hideousness of factory work and the ongoing rot and decay of the salmon stuffed in the pipe. Things had got bad. The stench, having increased to rotting carcass proportions, had stopped work in the factory, everyone had had to identify the source and Catherine had to surreptitiously lead co-workers to the offending pipe, and remove the decaying flesh.

Rotten salmon removed, the numb comfort of repetitive routine returned to the factory without us.