Complaint Review: Peter Pan Seafoods Ppsf.com Peter Pan

i had a similar experience when my girlfriend and i worked for the Valdez plant. Indeed it seemed as there was alot of preference within the Filipino community. Any job advancement or opportunity was for that race only. Being friends and especially family with the management and leads were the only way of having a good working experience with this company. There was so much discrimination with us this past year that im amazed we made it thru the season. We were picked on, we were targeted to mess up our jobs to get written up, we were talked about daily, laughed at, my girlfriend was sexually harassed, constantly bothered by men and had sexual soliciting remarks made to her and there was nothing they did about it the entire time except tell her they would talk with the guy but to just forget about it because the season was almost over anyways, it was an uncomfortable experience to work around a guy that sexually harrased you and now was mad you told on him. I myself hurt my hand during work and it became painful to work at the canline and endured weeks working there without being transfered to another job, meanwhile Filipinos that had friends and family were getting transferred to other jobs when they simply got bored or tired or simply didn't want to do those jobs anymore, but me hurting my hand and having the doctor write a note about my torn finger ligament didn't get me a transfer until the last week of the season. Trully sad experience. 

All above reports/rebuttals have some truth to them. You can improve your chances at Peter Pan King Cove if you work hard, turn the other cheek, keep your mouth shut and put in many years. But you are white, male and only speak English.....then you have a snow ball's chance in heck to get ahead (unless you happen to be the production manager or the plant manager). 

Peter Pan Seafoods --and most processing plants in general -- depend on foreign workers, J-1Visa students or workers not educated in the U.S. because they don't speak up when their rights are being violated. If there are bed bugs in the bunkhouses, they probably won't put much of stink about it as their Americanized counterparts. If their timecards have been unjustifiably adjusted by the the bookkeepers, they will not put up much of a fight about it. Non-Americanized workers are less likely to document company violations, less likely to call foul to the Union, less likely to report genuine injuries on the job, more likely to allow themselves to be harassed and less likely to call the Department of Health, Department of Labor, or OSHA when there is a issue that needs to be addressed.  

So that is why I believe non-Americanized workers are so coveted and that is why the work force is primarily Filipino and Hispanics. 

The problem for newbies that only speak English is that they will have a big problem trying to socialize and adjust to the mass of workers that cannot or will not speak English at the workplace. It puts English-only speakers at a great disadvantage when people getting the best jobs and the most hours are buddy-buddy with the crew leaders who primarily speak Tagalog and Spanish. The crew leaders also party with some of their workers .....and who are they going to hang out with when they are drinking? Other people that speak the same language as themselves! And who do you think these crew leaders and the massive foreign work force is going to give more opportunities to? The people they hang out with and party with.

In conclusion, if you are white and only speak English, you may do okay in King Cove, but you are at a massive disadvantage unless you just happen to know somebody that can get you a cherry job in the office.

Nepotism is rampant at their King Cove Plant.  I sent a couple of years there so far. The place is full of foreign nationals. The largest percentages are Philippine and Hispanic. Then to a lesser degree Caucasian, African and some East Asians. A very devious community. Yes I mean "DEVIOUS" It can be a real shock if your not use to it.

I work in XXXXX so I have pretty steady hours but what the first poster wrote is true about favoritism. People working there prefer keeping there relatives working while newbee's sit out the slow periods. There is no recourse for the new workers, they get the worst jobs and shortest hours. Basically relatives count. Some of the lead processors take liberties with their authority seriously challenging the character of the new employees. The hours are long when working and shifting positions is common, a technique for breaking an individuals moral. This is done with the knowledge that if you quit or in anyway break your contract, your pay will be forfeit for travel expenses. You do get 3 write-ups though. Some of the employees have worked there for decades, ever since they chased out the native workers in favor of cheaper imported labor. You had better know 3 or 4 languages too.

I could go on and on but I think you get the idea.

I also worked at Peter Pan Seafoods in King Cove Alaska from 6/89 - 8/00. I can understand your concerns, but you are totally wrong. It is not a question of discrimination it is all about how long you are employed there. I also started on the boxing line and your experience closely resembles my first year at the plant. It is not that they do not like you because you are not Filpino it is that they do not know you or whether you are a good worker or not. It took me 3 years of going there every winter and summer before I was trusted enough to be given a position of more responsibility and that was the summer clean-up crew. If you want to talk about a dirty job try doing this one, it should be on the TV show dirty jobs. You wear raingear from head to toe and use a high pressure sprayer to clean inside and all over the plant on graveyard while the line is down overnight. You actually have to use a lock out on the canning machinery because part of the job involves crawling around inside the machines in order to remove any salmon pieces stuck inside the machines. The water sometimes comes right back in your face along with chunks of fish, so it is not easy by any form of the imagination. I did this job for 2 years and always with a good sense of humor and made friends with all of my coworkers, they were hispanic (just like me, and yes I was born here in the USA), filipino, and white; we were a rainbow crew.

I then was given the job of tally person in the winter, which involves keeping a count of all the boxes of the various species of crab packaged during the winter and I also drove the forklift when the regular driver was out sick or we had too much product to move for one or 2 drivers. In my 5th year I became a quality control inspector in the winter, a job I had experience in while I lived in my home state of California. I took me 5 years to achieve this because there were other people doing the job and I had to wait both for an opening and to be trusted with this much responsibility. By the summer I was given even more responsibility as the assistant to the lead raw fish inspector. This is a position that requires you to be on-call 24/7 during the summer and to regularly put in 100 hours in a week. You are the first person to be in the plant whenever a fishing boat arrives, even if you just went to sleep 2 or 3 hours ago. It is a voluntary acceptance of responsibility and I knew it before I said yes to this job, so don't cry for me Argentina.

By my 7th year I was the Lead fish inspector and I was trusted with the keys to the plant and was responsible for my own assistant. I had 3 assistants in my 3 years as the lead, this is how hard this job is. Unfortunately I came down with a condition called Salmon Asthma, a sickness that is unique to the fishing industry. I had to use an inhaler and was not able to even enter the plant during salmon season. I then was given a job in the parts room, a combination tool crib/ machinist parts store/ and naval supply store. This is where I spent my last year in King Cove before coming down with another health condition called diverticulitis (a intestinal condition that is VERY painful) and I went home for the last time.

I speak perfect English, am fluent in Spanish, and no I never learned Tagalog (the correct name for the filipino language). It did not matter to the people I worked with who not only accepted me but became some very close friends who I miss dearly. The point is that this place is what YOU make it, you must have patience and be willing to make friends with the filipinos who work there. In fact on several occasions when drunken fishermen would come up to the fish bins where I worked during summer I was never afraid because I knew my friends had my back. But if you think you are going to be a forklift driver in your first year just because of where you were born then you might want to consider getting a job in the lower 48 states. Oh by the way in case anyone is wondering the INS has visited the plant on many occasions and ALL of the people there are legal, there are no illegals at the plant, because if immigration finds any they are always deported on the spot. The company does NOT knowingly employ illegals.

JF Miranda

Menifee, California

(I do not wish to be anonymous)

Good luck and don't give up and you will get better jobs.