A Day in the Canneries

Cannery Row’s workforce was summoned by a chorus of cannery whistles as men and women in rubber boots and oilcloth aprons arrived to clean, cut, pack, cook, and can sardines, which were a major part of Monterey’s economy for more than three decades. The work was dirty, hard, cold, and wet, and the smell of sardines reduced to fertilizer, fish meal, and chicken feed permeated the Row as at least a half-dozen languages rose over the din of canning machinery. Men operated and maintained equipment and warehoused and shipped the finished product, while women worked the packing lines filling Cannery Row’s trademark one-pound oval cans with sardines and salmon. Until the formation of the Cannery Workers Union in 1936, wages averaged 25 cents per hour. At the peak of the 1941-42 season, the canneries packed 250,287 tons of fish, but the industry’s harvesting capacity soon outdistanced the sardines’ ability to reproduce, and the fishery crashed. Asked at the end of the 1947-48 season where all the sardines had gone, Ed Ricketts replied, “They’re in cans.”

Monterey, California · United States