I’m always kind of cautious about writing on being a fisherman and the issues that it brings (the same way that about being a fisheries observer, even if it was less time) because it only a take, my own one, based on my experience in some fisheries a while ago and to a point a privileged one, being part European and a big intimidating looking man (so I been told).
Yet that does not invalidate my experiences, particularly when I read so much about labour issues in fishing by people that, while well intended, never spend much (or any) time as commercial fishers in fishing boats.
I have been working in this area for a few years, and I have been involved in some worthwhile initiatives, have published both academically and non-academically, and have been qualified by ILO as an inspector on labour issues on fishing boats. So, my interest is not an amateur one.
Yet it did confront me at a recent conference where I was a speaker and the panellist on IUU fishing. I put a lot of time into explaining the MCS structure we use in the FFA region, the methodology we used for our IUU qualification report in 2016, how we used the results to both guide better MCS operations and better data sources, and how the 2021 quantification update showed a fall in 50% of the estimates… yet 90% on the discussion was on labour issues. And they are not the same… they may happen in the same workplace, yet they may not be automatically related.
Furthermore, the discussion mainly mixed safety at sea, human rights violations and labour issues in one bag, considering that all fishing fleets are equally distributed everywhere. And somehow setting the picture that all fishermen are simultaneously criminals and labour rights victims.
And this is not my experience… so I was asked to write about it… so yeah, this blog entry is the result.
Again, what I write below is what I have seen in almost 40 years of working in commercial fishing in the South Atlantic, eastern, western and South Pacific and a little bit in the Indian Ocean, across side and stern trawlers, squid jiggers, demersal and surface longliners, purse seiners, pole and liners.
Yet I’m the 1st one to recognise that most of that experience did happen a while ago, while I was halfway in between the deck and the bridge either as deck boss and/or 3rd /2nd mate/navigator and when DWFN had mostly crew from their own states and reflagging to open registries wasn't as common then as is today.
Overall, in my experience, I’ll say that I have personally witnessed and/or experienced the issues I will qualify below in 60 to 70% of fishing trips I have been on, so yes, they are prevalent.
Now, as with anything in nature, events are distributed in the shape of a bell curve, which is the most common type of distribution for a variable, so much so that it is also known as the “normal” distribution.
The highest point on the curve, or the top of the bell, represents the most probable event in a series of data (its mean, mode, and median in this case), while all other possible occurrences are symmetrically distributed around the mean, creating a downward-sloping curve on each side of the peak. The width of the bell curve is described by its standard deviation.
Now, by far, the most common labour issue I have seen and experienced in my life is to be paid what I was promised and on time. And I’ll say this way over 50% of the issues most fishermen face… yet this is seldom mentioned…and most of the focus is on the almost human rights side of things.
Also, in my experience, the payment issues arise from two elements:
The nature of fishing… while there are many different ways in which fishermen get paid, most of them involve some share arrangement of catch value, and you get to that after the fish is sold (one of the many jobs I had was to the crew rep at the time of “weight in” of catch.. so from here you make some estimates) so basically you don't really know your full payment until it arrives… and mostly id does not arrive to you, but to your dependents somewhere in the word that have no idea how much you estimated.
and
the overall dodginess of the company you work for, which (again, in my experience) relates to the overall dodginess of the country where they are from… transparency international corruption indexes align pretty well with my best and worst experiences (NZ was the best if you keen to know… the worst are like comparing if you rather have diarrhoea or vomiting)
The rest is a gradual descent into human interactions and pettiness… and for that, we need to understand the overall relationship structure of males in confined spaces, as you see in jails, the armed forces, mining, oil industry, etc.. a lot of it has been analysed in the military (and I know it from personal experience having joined the Navy as a cadet at 12 years old).
Sociological research in the navy suggests that tyrannical behaviours include arbitrariness and self-aggrandisement, belittling others, lack of consideration, a forcing style of conflict resolution, discouraging initiative, and noncontingent punishment. And if you see, a lot of the issues analysed in the “labour rights” literature( aka bullying, physical, emotional and sexual abuse, etc.) are (for me) deeply rooted in the nature of the job and the people on board.
Research calls this petty tyranny, and it is argued to be the product of interactions between individual predispositions (beliefs about the industry, their subordinates, glorifying themselves, and preferences for action) and situational facilitators (institutionalised values and norms, power asymmetry, and stressors).
Consequently, this causes low self-esteem, performance, work unit cohesiveness, rank endorsement, high frustration, stress, reactance, helplessness, and work alienation among pairs, abuse by those pairs, depression, and, unfortunately, as witnessed once suicide. It is further argued by scholars on the topic (since the 50s), that these effects may trigger a vicious circle that sustains and even enhances tyrannical behaviour.
On one side, it is also essential to understand the type of people that go into fishing and why they are doing it…
I wrote a bit on my case here, but in a nutshell, when I started, the primary qualifications you needed to go fishing were a hard stomach and to don't give a shit about much, really… so it was somewhat natural fitting for me. It was rough, but the entry requirement was (and still is really low).
Yet you soon realise that it is not a job for “normal” people. If you don't know if you are coming back every time you get out fishing, everyday life looks different.
Also, the basis of your relationship with fellow humans changes… when you share living quarters that are barely liveable with people you never meet before, yet you hear ALL their body’s noises less than a meter from you… one develops an open mind and thick skin.
I soon realised I didn’t have to like the bloke next to me… nor he had to like me! But we needed to trust each other because our lives depended on each other. I fished with awesome people and some real shitheads whose views about aspects of life I despised… but they were “solid” fishermen, and I’ll have them as crew anytime.
But also, you don’t really get involved in their dealings with others unless they are shitheats with you… then you need to react and stand your ground.
Yet if you cannot (for whatever reason) hold yourself against the real shitheads, the petty tyrants… your life can descend fast into nasty places due to progressive bullying and physical harm.
Life at sea sorts out people quite fast; either you deal with it, or you don't, and as such is better if you don’t go back... but as said, that is a luxury many don’t have… and there (at least in my tiny brain) is where the most prominent problems arise.
And I wish the culture in fishing boats, as the culture in jail or in the navy, could be changed overnight to be more progressive and inclusive; they are definitively changing. Yet, never at speed needed… and I’m not sure if they ever will, unfortunately, to the extent that some expect.
If you have never been in the armed forces, ordinary jails or fishing boats, you can look into many war movies and see that these situations are unfortunately not uncommon on jobs of this nature. I was always quite lucky in both my navy and fishing experience to be a big, odd, yet dependable guy… as to people not to mess too much with me. But on the other side, my time and experiences in the navy were the loneliest and most depressive time of my life… I had dragged my PTSD since then, over most of my career, until very recently when I had no other option than to confront it with professional help if I wanted to maintain my family, and I will always be very thankful and indebted to my wife for helping me to confront a lot of it.
In any case, fishing was (and still is) the option for people on the margin of “normal” society, for the “unadapted” (what a concept!), to have a chance to make relatively good money (at least in comparison with the other options available) if one had the guts to deal with it.
Also, from personal experience, I met more people with dyslexia, PTSD and what I got to know later as Asperger’s or autism spectrum syndrome than in any other context I have been.
That was then… today’s picture is different; while it still has some of those guys, but now includes the poorer (and sometimes options-less) citizens of complex countries in SE Asia (Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam, Myanmar, etc). I fished with many of them, and their angle was different; their options are so much more limited than for westerners (or part Europeans like me), so they get into fishing because it is one of the few things they can do and not because they are not really good for anything else (as in my case).
Needless to say, and as a corollary, for every shithead I worked with, I also fish with some of the most unique, resourceful, resilient and genuinely gentle people I’ll ever met, they allow me to have a worldview that most rich westerners dont have in fishing.
In any case, among the slide to the extremes of the normal distribution (again, in my experience), after payment issues, we have bullying/emotional abuse 30%, then physical abuse 10%, and then sexual harassment (1%) last in the extremes.
my onboard bell curve of shit experiences
The fact that they all happen is a tragedy, no doubt. Yet not all happen in the same frequency and distribution; that does not need to be forgotten as it does help in strategising the measures to deal with these issues that (again) are not exclusive to fishing.
It really worries me that the criminalisation discourse I see worldwide, is cornering fishermen to a dual role of simultaneously being environmental thugs and victims of labour abuses, with no qualifiers in between them or any risk exposure, and this is not fair.
Thankfully I never had to work on vessels where I’ve seen people on bonded labour of slavery… I would have done something for sure; I know these events do happen… yet they occur in fleets that I had no exposure too.
So yeah, this is my take for whatever it is worth… it comes with the advantage of being a no-one and not having to tow an institutional line; you are free to disagree… but please don't discredit my experience because it is different to yours… or your saviour narrative.