D, 28-year-old Indonesian man, was witness to a deadly assault on a fellow boat crew member by the captain when they worked aboard the Taiwanese fishing vessel Da Wang a few years ago. The captain hit his friend in the head, then forced them to continue working.
In the morning when we woke up for breakfast, we found him dead in his room. The captain wrapped up my dead friend’s body with a blanket and then stored him in the freezer, D said in an interview in July 2019.
D is one of 34 Indonesian sailors featured in an investigative report by the environmental group Greenpeace and the Indonesian Migrant Workers’ Union (SBMI) published on Dec. 9. The organizations looked into their complaints of forced labor during their employment on 13 fishing vessels registered in China, Taiwan, Fiji and Vanuatu.
The crews’ statements described conditions in which they experienced overwork, withholding of wages, debt bondage, and physical and sexual violence. These conditions eventually forced them to cut short their working contracts, which typically run about two years, and forfeit the deposits they were typically required to pay to get the jobs.
There’s a strong interrelation between illegal fishing and forced labor of crews aboard fishing boats it’s two sides of the same coin, Arifsyah Nasution, oceans campaigner at Greenpeace Southeast Asia, told Mongabay.
With coastal fisheries being depleted due to overfishing, vessels are heading farther out into open waters and high seas, in turn racking up higher operating costs. Companies look for cheap labor to reduce costs and stay profitable and much of that cheap labor comes from Southeast Asia.
The way for [companies] to survive is by doing illegal activities: unreported catch, shark finning, transshipment so they can stay out in the seas longer, and sacrificing standards for salary and life on board, Arifsyah said.
Citing the Taiwan Fisheries Agency, the report says 21,994 Indonesian fishers were working on Taiwanese coastal and distant-water fishing vessels as of June 2019. Migrant boat crews from Indonesia and the Philippines make up a large component of Taiwan’s distant-water fleets, one of the top five in the world and responsible for an industry valued at $2 billion a year, according to Greenpeace.
While the abuse mostly occurs once the crews are aboard the vessel, exploitative working arrangements begin with recruitment by fly-by-night hiring agents, the report says.
Many Indonesian migrant fishers are reportedly given false seafarers’ papers by the hiring agencies, which in most cases aren’t even licensed to send workers overseas; only two of 124 registered manning agencies had permission from the Indonesian Transportation Ministry to recruit and place migrant fishers aboard foreign vessels, according to government records cited in the report.
The migrant fishers also have to agree to a payment scheme in which their salaries are deducted to pay guarantee deposits and processing fees for the first six to eight months of their employment, forcing them to work long hours for little or no pay, the report says. And when a crew member fails to complete their contract, they will lose the deposit, it adds.
The clauses in the contract are already unfair, Arifsyah said. There’s an indication that [working conditions] are designed to be inconvenient [for the boat crews], and it’s being used to benefit the local recruiters and agencies abroad.
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