How workers from Mexico have been keeping a Newfoundland fish plant running.
Roxana Zuniga leaves Terra Vista Ltd. after a day of weighing and sorting snow crab.Vaden Oram’s last trip to Mexico wasn’t an all-inclusive beach vacation.
Vaden Oram travelled to Mexico in February to attend the wedding of his workers Erika Trujillo and Denay Gonzalez. “The wedding was so elaborate and so beautiful,” said Oram, who is not just operations manager at Terra Vista, but also its former owner. “It’s not hard work for us. We enjoy what we’re doing and we [love] what we are doing,” said Trujillo.
Ramon Mayoral moves a crate of cooked snow crab to a station where it will be weighed and later packaged for international markets. Gonzalez’s job, as a butcher, is to kill the crab, one by one, by smashing their bodies on a blade, and letting the discarded shell and juices fall to the floor. That’s when Oram decided to bring in temporary foreign workers, a practice that has long been common in the food industry across Canada, and is now very much a factor in Newfoundland and Labrador’s seafood business, too.
When the federal government shuttered the Northern cod fishery in 1992, and put 30,000 harvesters and plant workers out of work, he was worried about the future of his plant. But like many who were determined to stay in the industry, he focused on other species, found new markets for his products and learned to weather the ups and downs of a business where prices, supplies and market tastes are all changing.
She did not leave the industry so much as was forced out when the moratorium threw everything into chaos three years later.“I decided to take up my second passion: nursing,” she said, adding that her tuition was paid for and the federal government provided a monthly stipend while she moved into a new career.
“When school finished in June, just the students alone was enough to keep a plant going… and over the years, it just got less and less and less.”A declining population — including the exodus of young adults and parents — has had a remarkable impact on the potential labour pool. In 1990, there were about 31,500 kids in high school across Newfoundland and Labrador. This year,Like many other seafood processing plants, Terra Vista plans to continue bringing in more temporary foreign workers.
The Terra Vista plant is divided into a section where snow crab is broken down and sorted and another section where the crab is cooked and packaged. Rocio Naal Cab and Manuel Caralho are a part of a workforce of temporary foreign workers that are keeping many fish plants open. `“The biggest issue is we’re ending up with an aging population and our young people are gone away for higher paying jobs, in Alberta, for example.”Guacamole, fried chicken and some tunes
Oram’s contribution to the potluck is fried chicken from the local Mary Brown’s restaurant — a local flavour the workers from Mexico have come to love, and buy every time they go out of town. “We sing music every day at work,” said Moulaison, adding that Roxy learned some new English vocabulary from song lyrics. Trudy is learning Spanish too — “some good and some bad, but I try to stay away from the bad.”
During a speech to thank the Mexican workers for their dedication to the plant, Oram talks about something else that the people in front of him have in common: having to leave home for work. He describes how many Newfoundlanders have trekked to Alberta to earn money for their families back home.