Thailand’s seafood slavery: Why the abuse of fishermen just won't go away
13 June, 2020
Aung Ye Tun was just simply 17 years good old when he was tricked and forced to job under slave-like conditions on a Thai fishing boat.
For five years, this Myanmar national was exploited along with other trafficked youths. “When the situation was at its worst, we utilized to say this was hell,” he explained. “It was enjoy hell.”
He described how they worked at any hour with only one half an hour’s rest a evening, and anyone caught sleeping without permission would be beaten. Meals was scarce, plus some of these resorted to eating raw squid.
“If they saw us consuming it, they’d beat us. Thus I’d conceal the squid in my own boot. Then I’d pretend to visit the toilet, and make the squid in the exhaust pipe,” he recalled. “We were hence angry and embittered.”
For decades, a large number of vulnerable migrants like him have suffered aboard Thai fishing boats for sale, with no help and little method of escape.
The Thai government has, under international and press scrutiny, started cracking down upon this slavery at sea recently. But the perpetrators have located ways to navigate across the constraints, as the programme Undercover Asia realizes.
GRABBING GLOBAL ATTENTION
Thailand is among the world’s major seafood exporters. Its items like sardines, prawn and squid possessed an export benefit of US$6 billion (S$8.4 billion) found in 2018, according to research firm Statista.
The industry suffers from extreme labour shortages, however, which many boat owners make an effort to resolve by trafficking in migrant personnel from a number of the poorer countries in the region.
Patima Tungpuchayakul, co-founder of Thailand-based non-governmental organisation Labour Safeguard Network (LPN), estimates there are around 600,000 personnel found in this sector and around fifty percent of these are migrant workers.
Following a group of press exposés of the exploitation - from starvation to physical abuse - of the migrant workers in 2014 and 2015, the country’s fisheries commenced attracting the world’s focus.
In 2015, the European Commission threatened to ban Thailand’s seafood exports over the illegitimate and unregulated areas of its fishing industry.
“That kind of bad attention created pressure on the (Thai) government and the industry to repair not just the unlawful fishing problem however the labour problem too,” said Jason Judd, a former manager at the International Labour Organisation (ILO).
The government started increasing protections for migrant employees by, for example, establishing port-in port-out (PIPO) inspections - which require boats to report for inspections because they depart and go back to port - and increasing fines for violations.
Thailand also began dealing with the ILO, a United Nations agency, to boost labour laws and regulations, including to fight exploitation and trafficking.
“Among other things, the Thai government has applied labour legislation that applied ... on terrain to the ocean. That’s a huge deal,” said Judd.
DIFFERENT METHOD OF COERCION
While the new tips have changed the type of the exploitation, they have certainly not eradicated it.
Labour Minister Chatu Mongol Sonakul maintains that there surely is no people trafficking in the fishery sector, but a recently available ILO report states in any other case.
Amid the improved working conditions because of changes in Thailand’s legal framework, abuses in the sector persist, based on the ILO.
“We ran through factors of forced labour … and in the long run, we determined that 14 % of fishers we surveyed were in forced labour situations,” said Judd.
During the past, threats of violence to keep migrant personnel on the boats were common, but nowadays, boat owners coerce them by illegally withholding their wages instead.
“Fishers don’t have complete control more than their fork out. And that’s essential because control over pay is control over do the job,” said Judd.
One of the changes before few years was first the requirement that these personnel have a bank account and so are paid electronically. “However, many vessel owners took control of fishers’ ATM cards,” he added.
Debt bondage exists for the reason that some of these workers “are frightened to leave or transformation to another boat when they know they’re with debt”, said Ussama Kaewpradap, lead organiser in the Fishers’ Rights Network.
They continue employed in the boats where they could get abused.
She noted that some owners also retain the workers’ identification files to avoid them from active or changing employers.
One migrant employee, who wanted to remain anonymous, said he was not allowed to hold his passport and paperwork up to speed the boat, where he stayed for over a year.
He was paid about 3,000 baht (S$135) when his boat returned to port. And when he asked for his wage, his employer told him to come back to the boat.
“In that case he called the authorities. One of the policemen … set me in handcuffs,” stated the worker. “He then defeat me up and kept me in a monastery. Plus they didn’t provide me my pay.”
Mongkol Sukcharoenkana, the president of the National Fishing Association of Thailand (NFAT), an alliance of fishery organisations and business operators, said regulations is “quite severe” to consider the confiscation of employees’ documents a “human-trafficking subject” and forced labour.
On the problem of bank cards, he said it could be that the workers have no idea making withdrawals or that the ATMs are “too far away”.
“Therefore they ask the captains to withdraw cash for them, or they go with the captains to take on money out. That is why they keep the cards with the captains,” he said.
‘A THEATRICAL EXERCISE’
Within its initiatives to avoid trafficking, Thailand has sent naval patrols to inspect fishing boats far from shore.
The government started using GPS trackers in 2015 to monitor vessels at sea, and inspecting fishing boats for sale that dock at Thai ports to ensure compliance with the brand new rules.
Of these inspections, the officials might check the personnel’ contracts and ascertain if indeed they were being taken care of, said Chatu Mongol. Groupings like the LPN, however, assert these inspections will be superficial and that labour abuses happen to be rarely identified.
Human Rights Check out even called the labour inspections “largely a theatrical training for international consumption”.
“Under the PIPO program … officials talk with ship captains and boat owners and check records but rarely conduct interviews with migrant fishers,” the NGO said found in 2018.
The NFAT claims, even so, that trafficking of migrant workers has stopped as the brand new rules are too strict.
“If there’s an unlawful worker on the boat, the punishment … is an excellent of 400,000 to 800,000 baht, and the fishing licence would be confiscated. The punishments are very severe,” said Mongkol.
To crack straight down harder on against the law migration, Thailand and Myanmar signed a memorandum of understanding to legally provide employees from Myanmar to Thai fisheries.
Beneath the MOU, the paperwork is processed by official agencies, which gives the semblance of a back-up for workers. But problems have been referred to to emerge following the contracts are signed.
U Moe Wai, who heads the Migrant Employee Education Centre in Kawthaung, a Myanmar border town, said the MOU is indirectly supplying licence to human trafficking.
“Only 30 per cent of the staff are guarded, and the other 70 % aren’t covered because agencies aren’t complying with the rules,” he said.
REELING IN LONG-HAUL FISHING
The Thai government has also put restrictions on overseas fishing - Thai-flagged fishing boats must go back to a Thai port within 30 days at sea. This properly put an end to long-haul angling, said Judd.
But these regulations can be applied only to fishing boats for sale registered with the country. And when these Thai-flagged vessels venture into intercontinental waters, “it’s hard to police them”.
The captain of one transport vessel said there are “Thai boats with Myanmar names” fishing in the ocean around Myanmar. And the operators generally “bribe the Navy or the authorities to (permit them) continue working”.
“The big boats work for 90 days, without enough food supplies, and allow staff starve,” said the captain, who wished to remain anonymous.
Some people take their private lives by jumping into the drinking water … Sometimes the authorities don’t even understand that someone died.
Some Thai boats have already been renamed and reflagged in Myanmar, where there is less scrutiny. Other boats are thought to be fishing near Africa, under flags of countries with minimal maritime regulations, like Mongolia.
“We don’t genuinely have a good set of just how many Thai ships have already been sold overseas,” said Chatu Mongol.
But it isn't illegal, he added, for Thai-registered vessels to be sold overseas and for personnel to continue focusing on these boats. “There is no laws declaring that once you’re a Thai vessel, you’re definitely a Thai vessel.”
Years of inconsistent regulation experience managed to get difficult to monitor vessels which may have been traded. And when they happen to be unregulated, in addition, it means the migrant employees on board are extra at risk.
Handful of CARED ABOUT THEIR LIVES
Previous October, citing Thailand’s “long-standing worker rights concerns in the seafood and shipping industries”, the United States government moved to suspend All of us$1.3 billion in trade preferences for the united states.
Browse: Trump hits Thai seafood industry over worker rights
The reasons included the “failure to adequately provide internationally-recognised worker rights”, such as for example “protections for freedom of association and collective bargaining”.
Patima recalled that previously, however, few people cared about the lives of the migrant workers.
“We only questioned whether the seafood we ate was fresh and cheap. But we hardly ever once asked if the lives of the fisherman were as effective as ours,” she said.
The NGO she founded has rescued and rehabilitated about 5,000 former fishermen enslaved by boat owners in Southeast Asian waters.
Because the crackdown began, a huge selection of migrants have returned to Myanmar. But lifestyle is rough for them.
“The majority - about 70 % of the deported - will work again on illegal fishing boats for sale,” said Moe Wai. “That’s because fishing may be the only skill they possess.”
For Ye Tun, he got a job working in a good makeshift gold mine, where he faces a risk of the landslide or a good wooden frame collapsing along with him within the mine shaft.
“But without a doubt honestly, I’ll do the job in the precious metal mine for the rest of my life if it signifies that I don’t need to go back to the ocean even for a yr,” he said.
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