When I started fishing, it was a bit of an old school apprenticeship process… you had to do a basic training at the fishing school, then spend time on a fishing boat to pike up days under the “wing” of an experienced master fisher/skipper. “Padrino” was the one that gave me that opportunity (something I’m eternally grateful to him)… he was not a man of many words, yet full of wisdom. He always had a saying or a metaphor to make his point.
yeap… I’m the reasons your can of tuna is cheap
One of it earliest and one that keeps seen over the last 40 years is that: “fishing is like a chicken coop, the chickens on the top shit over the ones below, and so on… fisherman are at the bottom so we always get all the shit, and underneath us is just the ocean… we are the ones that pay the real price of fish”
So life wasn't hard enough for fishers (I wrote extensively on the labour rights and mental health) this recent paper (Seafarers in fishing: A year into the COVID-19 pandemic) proves, what we knew, yet is good to see it fully explained.
Seafarers/Fishers in distant water fishing have been disproportionally impacted by COVID-19.
Furthermore, it highlights 2 points I fully agree with and have been pushing wherever I can; Enhanced labor protections are needed for workers in distant water fishing, and a human rights approach to countering serious restrictions is worth considering.
This also fits on my opposition by principle against private certifications in the fisheries labour area.
As usual: read the original! I just quote the abstract and the discussion/conclusions and put in italics the parts I fully believe in.
Abstract
This paper builds on our earlier publication that examined COVID-19, instability and migrant fish workers in Asia during the initial six months of the pandemic. Drawing on interviews with port-based support organizations and various other international organizations, we outline how pre-existing structural marginalizations of seafarers in distant water fishing has made them particularly vulnerable to the negative impacts of pandemic management policies for seafarers. We focus our analysis on obstacles to crew change and reduced access to crucial shore services.
The basis of these longer term marginalizations includes the exclusion of fishing from the Maritime Labor Convention, the marginal status of fishing among global organizations concerned with seafarers, the dispersed ownership of fishing vessels compared to concentrated corporate ownership in shipping, lack of unionization, and frequent inaccessibility of consular assistance in fishing ports.
We also highlight differences among important fishing ports, showing that repatriation of crew and access to shore services is the outcome of negotiation among a constellation of port-based actors.
Discussion and conclusions
COVID-19 has created major problems for all seafarers, including significant obstacles for crew change and repatriation, along with access to essential shore services. We show in this paper how seafarers in global fishing have been especially affected by these issues, due to pre-existing structural marginalizations. The problems experienced by seafarers in fishing due to the pandemic thus help reveal the long term and institutionalized ways that workers in fishing have been marginalized compared even to seafarers in other sectors. The modes of marginalization are multiple and complex, but taken together they demonstrate how work in fishing continues to be treated as exceptional in ways that justify the exclusion of workers from many basic labor and human rights afforded to other seafarers and to terrestrial workers.
COVID-19 is also revealing the limits of C188 as a way of addressing these problems. While C188 can be a good start for committing flag states to implementing regulations to provide for some basic standards on working conditions, it does not include provisions present in the MLC (Maritime Labour Convention, 2006) that are crucial to the well-being of seafarers. This suggests consideration of how protections in the MLC could be extended, or how fishing workers can be brought under the MLC. To some extent this can be done on a case-by-case, or port-by-port basis, as some countries and ports already include seafarers in fishing under policies for seafarers more broadly. But this can only happen in places where current policies are liberally interpreted. Another option would be to extend national labor law to fishing vessels where this is feasible.
The research further illustrates how important it is to address problems at multiple scales, including internationally. The ITF, ILO, and IMO are key organizations who have been supportive of seafarers in fishing at a global scale, but they are limited in their capacity to act by the lack of legal instruments that they can use as leverage, as well as their physical absence from many fishing ports. We have also shown that the marginalizations identified in this paper also need to be addressed on a port-by-port basis, where legal and institutional resources vary, and where informal practice may not always be consistent with formal policy. For example, it does not help to specify a role for flag state government officials (for example, C188, article 43) [28], if flag state representatives are not accessible.
Port-based support organizations, including both religious organizations and NGOs who support migrant workers, are important for both understanding the problems faced by seafarers in fishing, and negotiating assistance for workers. Efforts seeking to improve working and living conditions for seafarers in fishing would do well to listen to and support these organizations. They often operate on very limited financial resources, as well as in a precarious legal status with respect to port or worker access.
Many of the cases we heard arguably violate basic international human rights principles, as codified in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights [68] and other conventions intended to protect vulnerable groups, including the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of their Families (1990) [69], and the non-binding Global Compact for Migration (2018) [70]. A key issue is that migrant workers in global fishing are effectively ‘foreigners’ in port states, who need to cross borders to go on shore, where their access to rights and services may thus be limited. The MLC includes provisions designed to address this situation, but seafarers in fishing are excluded and C188 is not very helpful. This suggests that a human rights approach to some of the issues outlined in this paper could provide an alternative approach to negotiating fishing seafarer rights with relevant states, especially those policies, legal instruments, conventions and protocols concerning state obligations to migrant workers and non-status people within their national territories. This is the approach taken by the UK-based Human Rights at Sea. The systematic violations of the rights of migrant workers in fisheries revealed by the COVID-19 pandemic are such that even the UN Commission of Human Rights could become involved.
In this paper we have focused on how the existing marginalization of seafarers in global fishing has contributed to their vulnerability to COVID-19 policies restricting crew change and shore access. The analysis has implications for the future as well, both while the pandemic continues, and after the pandemic comes to an end. Vaccine access is quickly becoming another key problem. Because fishing vessels often spend many months at sea, access to vaccination when they do visit ports is becoming a pressing problem. Some countries (e.g., Seychelles--interviews, [71]) have responded proactively by providing vaccination to seafarers in fishing. Others (e.g., South Africa [61]) were refusing to vaccinate seafarers as of the writing of this paper, at least in fishing.
Even after the pandemic has ended, the marginalizations that have been made visible during the pandemic will continue to degrade the welfare and working conditions of crew in distant water fishing. Any effort to improve poor and unacceptable working conditions in fishing will need to address them in some fashion, in particular, the exclusion from the MLC and the current inability of C188 to compensate. We argue that seafarers in fishing should be equal with seafarers in other sectors, and hope that future policies will work toward addressing the current inequalities and injustices.