In the 1960s, Lorient’s maritime quarter comprised seven ports. The largest, Keroman, competed directly with the port of Boulogne in an effort to establish itself within the European market. As the decade progressed, Keroman absorbed the smaller fishing ports, and 98% of the catch was unloaded there. Between 1961 and 1963, semi-industrial fishing vessels known as pinasses were introduced, alongside large-scale stern trawlers. The latter proved highly productive, increasing the supply of fresh fish and, consequently, the demand for workers to sort and process the catch before its distribution to Rungis and international markets. The port offered an unprecedented level of employment opportunities, attracting a predominantly female, unqualified workforce to the docks. Between 1965 and 1985, more than 1,000 women worked at the fishing port.
Lorient harbour operated around the clock, keeping pace with the return of the fishing fleet. Around 11 p.m., women would arrive hoping for a night's work, while others would arrive for the 6 a.m. to 7 a.m. shift processing the fish into whole fillets for the fishmongers, or mareyeurs. They were quick to reject the working conditions at the sorting stations, in the fish factories, and at certain fishmongers and came together to make their voices heard. Soazig Le Hénanff has collected their accounts, and the documentary Les travailleuses de la mer, filmed between 1982 and 1983, also recounts their struggle.
Port-Side Sorting
The trawlers and pinasses arrived in the harbour during the afternoon with full holds. From 11 p.m., dockers and unloaders began unloading the catch. At the same time, permanent and casual workers waited in the fish hall for jobs. Priority was given to those who had worked there the longest, and 150 trawlermen’s wives were guaranteed work. They were placed on a rotating schedule in groups of 50 to sort the catch from the pinasses. For casual workers, who were employed only when the catch was unusually large, there was no guarantee of work. The number of workers required was announced daily in the fish hall and in the local press. “When I could see in the newspaper that there was lots of work, I would go to the port, but I’d often come home without doing a night’s work. It was a waste of time.” Many of these woman (ten, twenty, or more) would wait until 5 a.m. in the hope of a night's work, because “You never know! They might suddenly need more people! We’d wait in the cold, in the fish hall, sitting on the crates. At 3 a.m. they’d tell us to go home, but without a car, you had to wait for the 5 a.m. vedette.” This could go on for weeks on end, the hope of earning a few pennies reduced to nothing.
The fish was brought to the sorting tables situated not far from the two landing areas - the deep-sea fishing basin and the pinasse basin. Sorting began at 12:30 a.m. and involved separating the fish according to species, size, weight, and freshness. Behind each night worker were forty yellow crates, positioned and moved by the loaders, which they would fill for hours on end. If was the season, each worker would fill around 20 crates with langoustine alone.
“When you arrive, you have to show that you want to work. You’re expected to get through two tonnes of fish per night on your own, so you can’t slack off. They select their workers based on the first two nights. If you make it through them, you’re in. Some didn’t come back after one night. It was too hard”, said Léonne Mahoïc, a fish sorter at the pinasse basin and founder of the women’s branch of the CGT union at Keroman port. Work stopped once the holds were empty and the tables cleared, typically any time from 7 a.m., but it could be as late as 11 a.m. Depending on the season, these women spent between one and four nights per week working at the port.
Processing and Commercialisation
Working in the factories
Fish was sold wholesale at auction to the fishmongers and processing plants at the port. In Lorient, between 1966 and 1977, the quantity of pollock landed by stern trawlers increased by 414.5%. Cod and ling also saw an increase in supply of nearly 23% between 1966 and 1976. These increasing volumes were mainly sold to Sopromer, an industrial company where the number of female workers doubled in two years.
In 1970, filleting was still done by hand. But by 1975, staff were working on mechanised production lines equipped with efficient fish-filleting machines. As in the sorting units, you learnt on the job: a worker would begin with handling and gradually learn how to fillet alongside her colleagues. This was the case for Thérèse Guillochon, who joined Sopromer in September 1970.
Working for the fishmongers
In 1973, the port of Lorient had 83 mareyeurs who bought freshly landed fish and processed it as quickly as possible for sale locally, at Rungis, or abroad. There was no frozen fish. These fish-processing workshops employed between 650 and 800 people depending on the season. The workforce, mostly female, was organised into teams of five to six women, with up to 30 or even 50 working together in the largest units. Like at Sopromer, they processed the fish into fillets and packaged them for shipment. The men - two or three in the smaller workshops - handled the transport of crates into the processing area and then moved them for dispatch. However, this did not spare female workers from a significant degree of manual labour. At Sopromer, working hours and break times were fixed. In the fish-processing workshops, however, you knew what time you started but never what time you might finish. The working day was very long and the wages were very low.
Working Conditions
Aside from administrative jobs, working conditions for both women and men were harsh. It was cold, draughty, icy, and wet. Working at night made these conditions doubly harsh. And since female fish sorters and male dockworkers did not have official employment status, they could not benefit from the usual advantages given to nightshift workers. “In winter, the straps of our aprons would freeze. The men’s beards too,” explains Huguette Mélédo. Tasks were carried out standing up, in rotation, sometimes bent over, in a constantly damp environment. Fish market auctioneer Daniel Le Squere perfectly describes the situation in the sorting areas and fish markets: “When I joined the busy fish halls in 1974, I was stunned by the extremely harsh working conditions: the cold, the ice, the dilapidated premises. The women would be permanently standing in a stationary position. The speed at which they sorted, the weights they lifted, the pace in the warehouses, and the long working hours during periods of high volume all meant they aged before their time, since they suffered from musculoskeletal disorders.” Heated, comfortable changing rooms were rare before 1970. Staff ate and changed in the attics of the warehouses, sitting on crates. Facilities were no better at Sopromer in 1970; new recruits had neither changing rooms nor a proper place to sit and eat lunch.
The First Whispers of Unrest
Among the mareyeurs, relations between female employees and their boss were based on patriarchal principles. Domination and division were frequently-employed tactics and some workshops experienced toxic working environments. To avoid oppression or to show allegiance, certain workers – often the ones who’d been there the longest - would bring presents for their boss or clean their car. These acts of submission were denounced by some women as early as the 1970s. Évelyne Rioual was among them. She began working in a fish-processing workshop in 1978, alongside her mother, giving rise to a clash between two generations with two radically different views: “My mother and I worked in the same workshop. She believed you should keep your mouth shut and show your boss gratitude if you wanted to get by.”
In Carole Roussopoulos’s documentary Les Travailleuses de la mer (1985), Léonne Mahoïc, a fish sorter at the pinasse basin and founder of the women’s section of the CGT union at Keroman explains that working and social conditions had changed very little over a century, particularly in the fish-processing workshops, where workers and employers were not bound by proper employment contracts. Seniority was not taken into account, and wages did not increase over time. Workers had to pay for their work clothing and its upkeep themselves: blue overalls, oilskin aprons, gloves, and boots. The poorest among them wore wooden clogs. Their specialist skills were disregarded and the idea of “Equal work, equal pay” was a far cry from reality. Female workers performing similar tasks and facing equivalent levels of physical strain to their male counterparts denounced the wage inequality.
The occupational medicine sector paid little attention to the working conditions of women at the port until 1980 when a newly arrived female doctor started working with the fish sorters to improve their posture and reduce, as far as possible, the number of hours they spent standing as well as the number of continuous repetitive movements, all of which led to scoliosis and other disabling rheumatic conditions in the medium term. For the mareyeurs, attention to the health and working conditions of their workers was not a priority and the modernisation of processing facilities to adapt workplaces for handling heavy loads in damp conditions progressed slowly. The workers' growing demand for recognition soon came into conflict with the lack of consideration shown by factory owners, shipowners, and fishmongers, as the women began to assert themselves.
The Introduction of Trade Unions
In the 1950s and 1960s, there was no established tradition of striking among these women. Many were the wives or daughters of fishermen and believed that if their wages increased and their working conditions improved, then their husbands’ income as deckhands or fishing boat captains would be reduced as a result. At Lorient's main fishing port, female fish sorters, fish-processing workers, and factory workers first got involved with trade unions (CGT, CFDT, and FO) 'in secret' in the late 1960s.
This emerging movement was linked to national trade unions’ efforts to mobilise the fish-canning and fish-processing sector. The first initiatives date back to 1972, when two CGT representatives employed at Sopromer in Concarneau targeted female workers at the Sopromer processing plant.
This discreet but deep-rooted movement emerged around the same period among fish sorters at the pinasse basin. In 1970, a few determined women campaigned for the work to be organised fairly. “Even at the risk of losing my job, I have never been able to tolerate injustice,” said Hélène Thomas at the time.
With the support of the labour inspectorate and the shipowners’ representative, the women succeeded in establishing a daily rotating shift system. This arrangement, based on a list of 54 to 58 permanent workers, guaranteed them one, and sometimes two, nights of sorting per week. A second list included “casual” or “new” workers, who were called in as reinforcements when demand exceeded 58 people. This first stand-off produced three major improvements: a significant increase in income, greater freedom of speech within the group, and an end to the traditional dominance of the formidable forewomen. Additionally, within the port itself, an office was set up to handle recruitment as well as the official and regular payment of wages. “Before, we used to wait in bars to be paid by the fishermen,” recalls Jeanne Le Clouérec.
“We had such incredible power. We could easily shut everything down. If we didn’t open a ship’s holds, the entire processing chain would stop,” admits Bernard, a dockworker from 1973 to 1996. By the late 1970s, support for the dockworkers’ was reflected in the provision of a room inside the port. During the following decade, this space was used by committed activists Annette Le Zausse and Thérèse Guillochon, staff representatives in the fish-processing workshops, where trade union organisation within the workforce was very weak. In 1979 between 650 and 800 women were working across 81 fish-processing workshops and the importance of this space should not be underestimated. It quickly became a place of sociability and solidarity.
Unusual Campaign Tactics
These women fought and campaigned joyfully, refusing to resort to destructive or violent means. “Our group demonstrations were happy times, because we no longer felt isolated on our picket lines at the far end of the port, far from the city. We saw lots of people, we sang songs together and chanted slogans,” recalls Thérèse Guillochon. Yet their joyful campaigning faced a harsh backlash, as Thérèse explains. “During various hearings with the Sub-Prefect, the Mayor of Lorient, or the Departmental Council, we, the staff representatives from Sopromer, would go dressed in our work clothes, in blue overalls. We would hear people saying, ‘Aren’t they ashamed to walk around the city in their work overalls?’ Others would say that we were workshy."
Strikes were no longer their only leverage. The women employed a variety of protest tactics, thanks to the rise in car, coach and train mobility. They organised strategic trips to Nantes, Paris, and Brussels in order to take their demands directly to the political decision-makers. In Nantes, Secretary of State for Maritime Affairs Guy Lengagne received a raucous welcome from the Lorient CGT Women’s unit when he arrived for an official visit. The women were accompanied and supported by male workers, as part of their campaign to obtain official dockworker status. However, it’s worth noting that in 1982, 30 men who worked unloading the semi-industrial trawlers were granted dockworker status while the female workers at the pinasse sorting stations got nothing!
On the bus, they practised singing the following song to the tune of La Carmagnole, a song made popular during the French Revolution:
« Monsieur Lengagne avait promis,
Monsieur Lengagne avait promis,
Une fois les conditions remplies (bis)
De nous donner la carte,
mais voilà que ça tarde,
Ah non Monsieur Lengagne, ça n’ira pas, ça n’ira pas
Ah non Monsieur Lengagne, ça n’ira pas »
("Monsieur Lengagne promised
That once the conditions were met (bis)
He would officialise our status
But there's been a real hiatus
Monsieur Lengagne, this just won't do
No, Monsieur Lengagne this just won't do")
A Half-Hearted Victory
In 1986, the pinasse fish sorters won a long battle. Thanks to the relentless efforts of Léonne Mahoïc and her friends over a decade, they obtained “green cards,” certifying their status as dockworkers. This card, a source of great pride, guaranteed them a minimum monthly volume of paid working hours (16 hours), a corresponding pension (instead of the basic social welfare pension) and retirement at the age of 55.
Opinion varies as to whether their campaigns were supported by the men within the CGT and by the dockworkers themselves. But what’s certain is that ten years later, during the dockworker reform driven by the State and French port authorities, which triggered new protests on the Keroman quays, the Lorient dockworkers protesting over the number of jobs in sorting and cargo handling did not include their female counterparts within the cause. The women were not only excluded from negotiations but also lost their sorting jobs. “We left in 1993, we hadn’t secured our pension. We were laid off and we had to retrain for other job sectors. It was sad,” recalls Huguette Mélédo.
In 1994, the male dockworkers, now salaried port employees, took their place. By the late 1980s, Léonne Mahoïc, Thérèse Guillochon, Évelyne Rioual, Rosario Medina Valverde and others all had to leave the port. Their involvement with the unions had cost them their jobs. “Many people will crush you. I remained silent to make sure I got paid at the end of the month. If you spoke up, you were punished for it. Somewhere like a fishing port, if you cause trouble, try finding work afterwards. There was collective action, of course. But it was confined to small groups within the fish-processing workshops," recalls Thérèse Guillochon.
From the 1970s onwards, these women established a form of solidarity and initiated bold forms of mobilisation that have left a lasting mark on the port. Their commitment led to victories which have impacted every working unit on the port, laying the foundations for social change. They then transferred that same level of commitment to their active roles supporting workers at the Labour Court (Conseil des Prud’hommes). Léonne Mahoïc was elected as a labour court councillor (conseillère prud’homale) in 1975 and went on to become president of the institution in Lorient on 15 January 2010, in official recognition of all her efforts. In April 2012 she was awarded the Legion of Honour. In a similar vein, Thérèse trained in employment law before rigorously and determinedly defending the rights of port workers for a decade, representing at least fifty individuals.
Translated by Tilly O'Neill
