Salmon Canneries

Canneries often employed dozens of Chinese, Filipino, Japanese and Alaska Native workers. Women and children worked in the cannery while the men fished. When times were good they made $5 to $6 a day. Companies usually employed about a dozen "white" men to supervise the work, maintain the machinery and monitor the shipment of the canned fish at the end of the summer. One or two men would stay on through the winter as caretakers. Chinese crews, hired by agencies in San Francisco, Portland or Seattle, often provided the cannery labor prior to 1900. Wealthy Chinese businessmen owned the agencies and they supplied the Chinese foreman and men who worked until the fish were loaded on a steamer to Seattle or San Francisco. Changing U.S. immigration laws brought Japanese workers to the canneries after the turn of the century and Filipino workers after 1922. Each ethnic group at a cannery usually had their own segregated bunkhouse and cooking facilities.