Forced labour and other abuses remain widespread in the Thai fishing industry, with promised reforms falling short of addressing the concerns of the EU and the US, according to a report by Human Rights Watch that was made public at a briefing in the European Parliament his week.
Thailand has an EU yellow card that could become a red card, which would shut down exports to the Eueopean Union, due to its poor record on human rights and dealing with IUU fishing, while the US Thailand on its Tier 2 Watchlist its latest Trafficking in Persons (TIP) report.
The 134-page Human Rights Watch report, Hidden Chains: Forced Labor and Rights Abuses in Thailand’s Fishing Industry, describes how migrant fishermen from neighbouring South-Eastern Asian nations are frequently trafficked into fishing work, prevented from changing employers, not paid on time, and paid below the minimum wage. Migrant workers do not receive Thai labour law protections and do not have the right to form a union.
Human Rights Watch interviewed 248 current and former fishermen, almost all from Burma and Cambodia, as well as Thai government officials, boat owners and skippers, civil society activists, fishing association representatives, and United Nations agency staff.
Of those interviewed, 95 were survivors of documented incidents of human trafficking, while the other 153 were, with a few exceptions, still actively fishing. The research was carried out in every one of Thailand’s major fishing ports from 2015 to 2017.
‘Consumers in Europe, the US, and Japan should be confident that their seafood from Thailand didn’t involve trafficked or forced labour,’ said Human Rights Watch Asia director Brad Adams.
‘Yet despite high-profile commitments by the Thai government to clean up the fishing industry, problems are rampant.’
In response to pressure, the Thai government has scrapped antiquated fishing legislation and implemented a new ordinance to regulate the fishing industry. It extended application of key provisions of labour law regulating wages and conditions of work to fishing vessels, and established in law some International Labour Organisation (ILO) treaty provisions through adoption of the 2014 Ministerial Regulation concerning Labour Protection in Sea Fishery Work.
Migrant fishers were required to have legal documents and be accounted for on crew lists as boats departed and returned to port, helping to end some of the worst abuses, such as skippers murdering crew members. The Port-in, Port-out (PIPO) system was also introduced, requiring boats to report for inspections as they departed and returned to port, and established procedures for inspection of fishing vessels at sea.
Some measures, such as vessel monitoring systems and limiting time at sea to 30 days, have led to important improvements for crews, although Human Rights Watch reports that measures to address forced labor and other important labor and human rights protection measures often prioritise form over results.
Despite significant resources provided to the Thai Ministry of Labour and its departments, there is no effective or systematic inspection of crews on Thai vessels. For example, in its 2015 report on human trafficking, Thailand revealed that inspections of 474,334 fishery workers failed to identify a single case of forced labour.
More recently, over 50,000 inspections implausibly did not find a single instance in which laws on conditions and hours of work, wages, treatment on board, and other issues in the Labour Protection Act of 1998, the 2014 Ministerial Regulation, and attendant regulations had been violated.
‘The Thai government’s lack of commitment means that regulations and programs to prevent forced labor in the fishing industry are failing,’ Brad Adams said. ‘International producers, buyers, and retailers of Thai seafood have a key role in ensuring that forced labor and other abuses come to an end.’
He commented that in some respects, the situation has become worse in recent years.
The government’s ‘pink card’ registration scheme, introduced in 2014 to reduce the number of undocumented migrants working in Thailand, has tied fishermens’ legal status to specific locations and employers whose permission is needed to change jobs, creating an environment ripe for abuse.
The pink card scheme, as well as practices where migrant workers are not informed about or provided copies of required employment contracts, have become means to conceal coercion and deception. This allows routine rights abuses go unchecked by complacent government officials who are content to rely on paper records submitted as proof of compliance.
Thai labour law makes it difficult for migrant workers to assert their rights. Fishermens’ fear of retaliation and abuse by skippers and owners is a major factor, but Thailand also restricts the rights of migrant workers to organise into unions to take collective action.
Under the Labour Relations Act of 1975, any person who does not have Thai nationality is legally prohibited from establishing a union or serving as union leader.
‘No one should be fooled by regulations that look good on paper but are not properly enforced,’ Brad Adams said. ‘The EU and US urgently need to increase pressure on Thailand to protect the rights, health, and safety of fishers.’
