On 12 March, four Indonesian fishers filed a lawsuit against Bumble Bee detailing egregious allegations of forced labor and abuse of workers on vessels that supply albacore to the U.S. market. The complaint details the harrowing stories of the men who left their villages to work on distant-water longline fishing vessels, based on promises of good jobs to provide for their families.
Instead, they suffered physical violence, excessive working hours, coercion, debt bondage, extreme isolation, hazardous working conditions and a lack of medical care on vessels included in Bumble Bee’s “trusted network.” The case is a landmark effort by workers to seek accountability from a corporation that profited from their abuse. It also lays out how the industry uses fishery improvement projects (FIPs) to gain Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) certification, often billed as the ”gold standard” for sustainable seafood, to improve market access for their products.
This lawsuit follows repeated U.S. import bans based on forced labor as well as actions to recognize the overlap between illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing practices and forced labor. These are anticipated to continue under the current U.S. administration’s public commitments to combat unfair trade practices, which include forced labor and human trafficking. New E.U. due diligence requirements and a ban on forced labor goods also tighten the seafood industry’s access to the largest common market.
The details of the lawsuit might be shocking to consumers who rely on canned tuna as an inexpensive lunch staple, but not to anyone who knows anything about the distant-water fishing (DWF) fleets that supply much of the world’s albacore. These supply chains are rife with serious labor rights violations, including forced labor. These violations are often structural, deeply embedded in a business model that relies on fishers – often migrant workers on tied visas – made vulnerable to exploitation by governance systems that deprive them of fundamental labor law protections. Industry actors at the top of the supply chain evade responsibility through opaque supply chains and participation in ineffective voluntary initiatives and weak certification schemes.
Read the full op-ed at Seafood Source...
Allison Gill is the legal director of Global Labor Justice, an NGO that works transnationally to advance policies and laws that protect decent work, strengthen freedom of association and workers’ ability to advocate for their rights, and hold corporations accountable for labor rights violations in their supply chains.
She is a human rights lawyer, researcher, and advocate who has conducted numerous field investigations into human and labor rights abuse, including in the seafood sector.
