Thailand’s $6.5 billion seafood export industry is the world’s fourth largest, supplying restaurants, supermarkets, and pet food brands worldwide.  Slavery and trafficking of fishers is endemic within the industry, aided and abetted by lax maritime labor laws and fueled by a seemingly insatiable global consumer demand for seafood.

Workers as young as 15 aboard a Thai fishing boat. Photo: New York Times.

While the Royal Thai government has passed legislation against trafficking and forced labor, health and safety, and tracking of vessels in recent years, it has had scant impact on the brutal conditions that have been well documented by NGOs as well as journalists.  The combination of depleted fishing stocks in the Thai Gulf and some limited government action to arrest boat captains and to begin registering and tracking vessels has led fishing boats to travel thousands of miles out to deep seas, increasing illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing and making workers ever more vulnerable.

Fishers in the Thai seafood industry face abhorrent conditions that are common to situations of forced labor and human trafficking in industries around the world:  deceptive recruitment practices (particularly of migrants), working days of twenty or more hours, physical abuse, and non-payment of wages.  But their extreme isolation on the high seas provides a context of impunity for violence so severe that “the boys and men who are its victims might as well be captives from a bygone era.  In interviews, those who fled recounted horrific violence: the sick cast overboard, the defiant beheaded, the insubordinate sealed for days below deck in a dark, fetid fishing hold.”

Given the fishers extreme isolation, there are profound challenges to identifying victims and to monitoring and enforcing the few existing protections to which these laborers are entitled. Simply getting information about the conditions and locations of fishers is a formidable task. Moreover, in 2014, a military coup deposed Thailand’s elected civilian government.  There is no right to freedom of speech or assembly making it extraordinarily difficult if not impossible for worker organizations to form let alone to effectively mobilize.

Adding to the challenges, most fish used in pet or animal food is currently not traceable by consumers beyond the onshore processing facility (for those few brands in Europe which provide a barcode enabling this), and the fish is not traceable port-side beyond the “mothership” to which deep sea catches are transferred.  While human rights advocates have called for a variety of measures – including requiring commercial fishing ships to have transponders and banning long stays at sea – they have had little effect in changing practices.  Historically, corporations either leverage this lack of traceability for their own profit while claiming supply chain “complexity” or retreat from the industry to clean their supply chain.

Meanwhile boat captains face pressures that suppliers near the base of global supply chains experience from agriculture to manufacturing: a razor thin profit margin, in this case made even more precarious because the deep-sea fishing boats work on commission.  The downward pressure on workers’ wages and conditions was pointedly stated by a Thai crew master to the New York Times, “Crews only get paid if we catch enough.”

While pressure from the US and the EU has cast a spotlight on the industry and added some pressure on the Thai government to pass legislation, the horrific conditions faced by fishers persist. To date, the companies atop the supply chain have failed to take meaningful action to identify the specific source of the fish or to address abuses in their supply chains.

In 2016, international trade unions made formal complaints to the International Labour Organisation (ILO). According to the ILO’s 2017 ruling, the Thai government’s monitoring and enforcement of what limited laws it has passed against forced labor and trafficking, is weak to non-existent.  The government has not revealed the penalties (if any) that are applied to perpetrators of these crimes. And there has been documented collusion between some public officials and traffickers.

WSR has demonstrated that corporations at the top of the supply chain whose brands are infected with vicious exploitation can and should use the full weight of their purchasing power to both require and assist in realizing workers’ rights.  Despite the absence of worker organizations and the weakness of the Thai government’s efforts, corporations purchasing seafood must use their “power of the purchase order” to help chart a pathway toward genuine monitoring and enforcement of workers’ rights. Currently, however, it is difficult to reliably trace let alone verify conditions on fishing ships given the enormous gap between Thai law and enforcement.

The Issara Institute, which was formed in 2014, has been working to equip fishers and migrants with cellphone applications, social media, and hotlines to know their rights and report abuses. The Institute analyzes the industry and provides corporations with monitoring data, including worker feedback, to voluntarily improve their supply chain practices.  Issara provides suppliers with compliance assistance and claims that solutions are implemented to address workers’ concerns. The group reports that ongoing contact with workers provides a feedback loop for continued improvements. Issara plans to extend its smartphone and social media apps to reach fishers on the deep seas.

However, belonging to Issara’s Strategic Partner Program does not appear to require brands to commit to stop sourcing in the case of continued non-compliance by suppliers.  Brands are encouraged to offer their suppliers the carrot of assistance (from Issara) but not the stick of zero-tolerance.  Neither does it appear to suggest that corporations shoulder contribute to the cost for addressing these abuses.  A WSR approach would suggest both are necessary.

A first steps towards a WSR approach, and real change, would be traceability, ensuring that specific boats can be linked to the brands the sell the fish caught by those boats. Corporate buyers could demand traceability of seafood down to the level of the sea trawlers fishing in deep seas where forced labor is prevalent and share this data with a third party independent from industry interests. These buyers could also be called upon to contribute a premium to the offset the associated costs for real-time and historical tracking.

With such traceability mechanisms in place, on-site monitoring by a third party or parties and vigorous enforcement with consequent penalties for non-compliance becomes conceivable, even if serious hurdles remain.