Despite all the empirical evidence from fishermen and the one place where it counts, the trawl surveys of the government, telling a conservation success story of a Northwest Atlantic teeming with dogfish and skates — the federal government has effectively shut down the closely related fisheries to protect stocks that would no longer seem to need protection.
So the Zeus Packing Co. is no longer packing. And the 70 to 80 people who drew paychecks from Zeus, an eight-year-old company founded in Gloucester by Spanish interests to buy, clean, pack and export to markets in Europe and Asia, are no longer getting those checks.
Kristian Kristensen, the Zeus CEO, said Tuesday he sees it all as such a waste, nearly a farce. And he attempted to document that through a tour of the refrigerated cleaning and packing rooms, about 8,000 to 9,000 leased square feet in the Gloucester Seafood Display Auction complex that thanks to NOAA actions have the ambiance of a morgue.
"Instead of laying off people," said Kristensen, "we should be hiring people."
Read the complete story from The Gloucester Daily Times.