FCF has organised the first of its Responsible Recruitment Project training sessions for the Indonesian Fishermen Association (INFISA) and nine local recruitment agencies. These sessions, held over a course of two days in Tegal, Indonesia, comes as part of FCF’s efforts to establish an industry-accepted recruitment standard for the distant waters fishery.
This year (2022), FCF, in co-operation with the INFISA, will introduce its Responsible Recruitment Program to these Indonesian recruitment agencies. To ensure participants fully understand the programme, FCF collaborated with Key Traceability (KT), an independent auditing and consultancy firm that actively promotes the concept of social and sustainable fisheries, to convene a two-day training session.
Dani Rahmat, the representative of KT in Indonesia, was invited to present various improvement measures of Responsible Recruitment Program, including capacity building, various requirement implementation, monitoring and improvement protocols, and management mechanism that the INFISA will help agencies to adopt in the future.
Furthermore, to raise the awareness and elevate the capabilities of attendees, the training also presented several international standards and best practices for fisher welfare. All of which contribute to improving the existing practice throughout the fishing industry crew recruitment process.
‘We believe that this Responsible Recruitment Training conducted in collaboration with FCF and INFISA is leading the way in ensuring crew rights are ensured right at the start of a fisher’s journey,’ said Lia Hayman who heads the KT Social Department and who helped organise the training.
‘Collaborating between the parties shows commitment of the supply chain to educate sending country recruitment agencies in best practices and drive change in fisher welfare. The recruitment of fishers onto fishing vessels is complex and therefore this training showed an important step in the right direction in terms of what needs to be improved for the conditions of fishers as it focused on decent contracts, deployment processes and grievance procedures. The sending country recruitment agencies are difficult to engage in social programs, and it was great to not only have them show up, but to be involved in the discussions and solutions.’
FCF states that it intends to continue to work with its supply chain partners and recruitment agencies, hoping to help the industry gradually improve labour rights and achieve the goal of industrial sustainability.
