ECONOMICS OF THE FISHERIES 355 



cents to 9.7 cents to which must be added costs of labor and supervision, 

 overhead, packaging, depreciation, sales, bad debts and manufacturer's 

 profit, if any. The most favorable assumption of recovery allows only 3,27 

 cents and the least favorable 1.4 cents to cover all these items. It is clear 

 from these figures how close is the margin on which filleting is done. The 

 business of filleting, as practiced in ig4o, yields practically no manufac- 

 turing profit, but it improves the competitive position of fish making a more 

 convenient and presentable product which is salable through outlets which 

 cannot handle whole fish. It also affords employment of labor at the points 

 of production and retains the offal for possible manufacture of by-products. 



Filleting can be, and nearly all of it has been, done by hand. It requires 

 a considerable skill, and some filleters are more skillful than others, so that 

 the averages of speed and recovery are well below the best. With diminish- 

 ing size of fish, the cost of filleting mounts rapidly; with increasing size, 

 the labor cost diminishes up to the point where the individual fillets are 

 too big and must be subdivided. Filleting machines are just now coming 

 into use which yield a higher percentage of weight than the average hand 

 filleting. These machines are complicated, made to close tolerances of 

 precision, and necessarily made of stainless steels, so that they are expensive. 



In places where raw material is available the year round, and volume is 

 large (as in cod, haddock, pollock and rosefish fisheries of New England), 

 the more nearly continuous operations are favorable to the employment 

 of both labor and capital; large and continuous volume also makes feasible 

 the use of expensive filleting and accessory conveying and other machinery 

 and leaves a sufficient volume of offal for economical manufacture of fish 

 meal. All of these things compound the disadvantages of smaller fishing 

 communities with smaller volume of assorted kinds of fish in intermittent 

 supply. These disadvantages can be compensated only in part by less con- 

 tinuous employment of labor and at lower wages. Thus it appears that, 

 at least with respect to finfish of the coarser varieties, the smaller commu- 

 nities have been put to a still greater disadvantage by the trend toward edible 

 portions than they already suffered with whole fish. At the same time, 

 because of the growing popularity and marketing advantages of fillets, 

 smaller communities are being put to a certain compulsion to fillet or else 

 see their present disadvantages further aggravated. 



By-products. In value of by-products, fish are undoubtedly at a disad- 

 vantage in competition with land animal industry. The latter, in addition 

 to edible meat, yields gelatin, hides, hair and wool, membranes, and a wide 

 variety of biological and medicinal products of high unit value, such as 

 insulin, adrenalin; liver, thyroid, and pituitary extracts; hormones, pepsin, 

 pancreatin, tr3^sin, bile salts, cholesterol from spinal cords, products made 



