Understanding Modern Slavery in the International Fishing Industry

Photo via the New York Times

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It seems that the world does not realize that slavery still exists. When we think of this word, our minds tend to lunge towards American history textbooks. We think of plantations, the Confederacy, and the past. We believe that slavery is a chapter of history that has long been closed. But what we fail to understand is that as the world has moved forward, slavery has progressed with it. Slavery has adapted and morphed itself into the mechanisms of modern society, hiding where we do not look for it. Slavery, once thought to be an agrarian practice, has shifted to the sea.

Far beyond the view of any coast, commercial fishing vessels operate in international waters where laws and regulations are minimal, and enforcement is virtually nonexistent. On the high seas, there are no police patrols, no coast guard oversight, and no appropriate mechanisms to ensure worker safety. With no enforceable regulation and no surveillance, labor abuses easily go unnoticed, and isolation areas are created where commercial vessels have unique opportunities to exploit labor. These deregulatory conditions have essentially established a ‘hidden’ workforce of fishermen that are practically invisible to regulators and consumers. And as a result, slavery has resurged—largely unrestricted and ignored.

According to the International Labour Organization (ILO), there are at least 128,000 fishers in forced labor across the globe. However, this number most likely underestimates the true scale. Labor abuses are severely undercounted in the fishing industry, yet the data we do have shows extremely alarming problems.

First, it is important to understand that migrants make up the bulk of people affected by slavery and labor abuses in the fishing industry. This is due to labor market intermediaries—also known as brokers—easily exploiting cultural and communication differences, as well as taking advantage of migrants’ unawareness of their rights. According to the Human Trafficking Search, “laborers don’t necessarily come from the same country as the ship they’re working on. Instead, they are most often ensnared by recruiting agencies in just a handful of countries: chief among them Indonesia and the Philippines.” Brokers thrive in countries with deregulated and unenforced labor markets, oftentimes preying on migrants who were already trafficked into the country, and then trafficking them again to fishing employers. It is also crucial to understand that these migrants often have no option but to go to brokers in the first place. A report from the Environmental Justice Foundation states, “Migrant workers often rely on brokers because of complex bureaucracy, language barriers and lack of local contacts to access the job market of a foreign country.” These brokers—many of which are unlicensed—then exploit migrants through lying about pay and working conditions, controlling and misappropriating their salaries, and requesting massive fees, just to name a few. 

After being deceived on board, migrants are then sailed out into the deep sea for months or even years on end. They face miserable conditions such as inadequate living quarters, unsanitary health conditions, emotional and physical abuse, absence of or illegal payment of wages, debt bondage, human trafficking, and slavery. Human rights abuses have been reported in countries all across the world, from Scotland to the United Arab Emirates. Yet, there is perhaps no region that has experienced worse abuses than in Southeast Asia, and Thailand in particular. 

The Thai seafood industry is over 800,000 workers strong, with over 90% of workers on Thai fishing vessels being migrants, mainly from Cambodia and Myanmar. About three-quarters of migrant workers are controlled in debt bondage, or forced to labor in wretched conditions for minimal or no pay, according to a 2017 report by the Thomson Reuters Foundation. Workers face 18-hour workdays, unsustainable food and water, and extreme physical abuse to support the nearly $8 billion seafood industry. Many workers who show even the slightest amount of resistance are often killed on the spot and thrown overboard. A report by the United Nations Inter-Agency Project on Human Trafficking found that “59% of trafficked migrants interviewed aboard Thai fishing vessels reported witnessing the murder of a fellow worker.” 

Many of these vessels that use slavery stay at sea for years at a time using a seafood transportation method known as transshipment; a process in which smaller slave vessels catch their fish and then transfer it to a large slave-free mothership in return for fuel and supplies. The mothership then mixes slave-harvested fish with legally caught fish, finally returning to port and unloading. The fish are then processed and distributed across the global market. This process allows for slave vessels to remain at sea for an indefinite amount of time, isolating their enslaved workers, and allows motherships to circumvent regulations while hiding their human-trafficked supply chains. Transshipment also facilitates the transfer of slaves and workers between vessels, helping to cover trafficking networks and keeping the slave population offshore. 

Human trafficking and slavery in Thailand are furthered by the government’s failing Port in-Port out (PIPO) system. This is a government-created inspection system across 22 coastal provinces. While intended to identify human trafficking, prevent crew transfer, and enforce legal compliance, PIPO has ultimately failed to enact any substantial change, and independent watchdogs have reported multiple inconsistencies and corruption within the system. EJF reported that in 2018, across 28 PIPO centers in Thailand, “there was not a single identified case of enforced labour or human trafficking.”

While it may not have been “identified,” of course, there was human trafficking, and we can look at the story of Lang Long, a Cambodian migrant who was trafficked into slavery aboard a Thai fishing vessel, for proof. Taking a trafficker’s offer to cross into Thailand for a “construction job,” Long was immediately kidnapped upon arrival, forced onto a ship, and spent the next three years of his life as a slave at sea. He recounted being resold between ships, shackled by the neck, and experiencing and witnessing extreme abuse. One of these abuses is whipping. Mr. Long stated how workers were often whipped for working too slowly or disobeying orders. Mr. Long also recalled that many days he would only receive one hour of rest from fishing, a time he spent primarily sleeping. And his case report from the Office of the National Human Rights Commission of Thailand stated, “He was beat with a pole made of wood or metal.” After three years of slavery, an aid group rescued Lang Long and returned him to his home in Cambodia.

Besides the lack of regulation and surveillance, why is slavery in the international fishing industry so prevalent? To answer this, we can look at the strong correlation between slavery, human trafficking, and labor abuses, with the increase of illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing. We are currently in the midst of a massive depletion of global fish stocks. Unsustainable overfishing and destructive fishing practices are devastating ocean environments and rapidly exhausting marine resources. According to an EJF report, “33.1% of fish stocks are fished beyond sustainable limits and 59.9% are on the edge, fished at maximal sustainable limits,” with IUU fishing accounting for about 30% of total catches in some regions. With an increasing global demand for seafood and a depletion of near-shore fish stocks, fishers have been forced to long-haul fish—going out to the high seas for months or years at a time to find bountiful fish stocks. These voyages have driven up costs for fishers, and with labor accounting for 60% of fishing costs, vessels have looked to alternative labor practices instead of wage-labor to make up for the increasing costs. And because these vessels rarely return to shore and are so far out in the ocean, they remain completely untouched by regulatory enforcement, enabling a wide variety of human rights abuses to ensure maximum labor productivity. Since these ships are isolated from the world, the workers have no means to find protection or contact authorities, giving them the option of slavery or death. 

Because of the correlation of IUU fishing and slavery, solutions must account for both issues. The world must look at both issues as one core problem and resolve IUU and slavery together. One of the easiest and most affordable solutions we can enforce is an international fishing vessel database. This means giving every vessel a unique number, publicizing vessel information, listing fishing authorizations, and noting the owner of each vessel. An international, public database would help authorities track and surveil vessels to ensure legal fishing, validate travel and docking records, and legitimize the international fishing labor market, bringing down the “hidden workforce” of enslaved fishers. 

States could also increase the allocation of resources into sea enforcement, adding more patrol vessels and tighter fishing regulations. On land, states could distribute more funds into the investigation of human trafficking networks, destroying the supply of illegal labor. This could be financially incentivized by organizations like the United Nations to account for a decrease in labor supply. 

One of the most effective solutions could be the prohibition of transshipment. Once motherships unload their fish into a processing center, and illegal harvest becomes mixed with legal, supply train tracking to trace ethical or unethical seafood sourcing effectively becomes impossible. This makes it extremely difficult for consumers and importers to identify seafood caught by slaves, making a consumer-backed boycott or collective action movement against fishing abuses to be unfortunately, futile, especially when demand for cheap seafood is so high. 

Therefore, we need strong state enforceability and international support and cooperation to forcefully prohibit transshipment, physically disintegrating the offshore slave market and opening pathways for public consumer and market protest. Prohibition of transshipment will also help to tighten the unreported factor in IUU, ensuring stricter reporting and more traceable fishing data. 

Modern-day slavery in the international fishing industry has no simple solution. And this tragedy persists because it is ignored. Sea slavery is profitable, discreet, and efficient. And most of the time, the enslaved are the most vulnerable among us. The enslaved are the voiceless, the powerless, and the exploited. We do not stand up for them even though they support our livelihoods. In 2023, the United States imported $25.5 billion worth of seafood, and billions of dollars of that catch was likely fished by the hands of a slave. Next time you are at dinner, think about how that fish got to you. 

Yet, just because the solution to this injustice is not simple, that does not mean it is not possible. The world has come together before, nations have stood up for justice before, and humans have cared for each other before. While solutions to slavery may be murky, the reasoning has never been clearer. The fishers who brave the ocean to feed the world must be treated with the dignity they deserve. And the international community must choose to no longer look away from slavery. Freedom has no borders, and we cannot let the ocean become the place where it disappears.

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This article was edited by Cameron Ma.