Berufsentwicklung in der deutschen Hochseefischerei. T. 2, Hochseefischwerker

Abstract

"The emergence of the vocational profile "deep-sea fish worker" was directly connected with the construction of the first factory ships. lt was not until the 1960s that these vessels had been developed to a degree that allowed their more extensive utilisation. Accordingly, only then did they require enough workers to justify the introduction of a new vocational profile. Yet this development was delayed in both German states, where two quite different paths were taken towards the goal of furnishing factory ships with qualified processing personnel. As in the area of deck personnel, the West German fishing industry chose to depend on apprenticeship and further qualification on board. The fish-processing combines of the German Democratic Republic, on the other hand, preferred skilled personnel with completed vocational training. Yet the latter regarded the requirements of work on the factory decks of their fishing fleet to be approximately the same as those of the fishing industry on land, thus failing to recognise the necessity of a separate vocational training course. Here the fleet was simply regarded as one of several possible employment opportunities available to those who had completed training in fish processing. The most significant difference, however, was not in the type of vocational training but in the actual makeup of the personnel: in the Federal Republic of Germany, the majority of deep-sea fish workers were Portuguese, while in the GDR this vocation was dominated by women. Thus vocational training in fish processing on board the factory ships, like vocational training on deck, was a direct reflection of the social circumstances of the two German states." (author's abstract)