Private governance of human and labor rights in seafood supply chains – The case of the modern slavery crisis in Thailand

Abstract

A growing recognition of human rights in business has shed light on labor violations and abusive practices that prevail in many global supply chains. The recent ‘modern slavery’ crisis in the Thai fishing industry not only brings the question of government's responsibility to the fore but also increasingly highlights the role of private governance in global supply chains. This paper provides an updated analysis on the state of labor rights protection in the Thai fishing industry by analyzing responses from private business and civil society to the modern slavery scandal. We focus on three responses in particular: ethical recruitment policies, worker grievance mechanisms and worker associations. We analyse the effectiveness of these responses and delineate the potential of private governance as well as the limits that need to be overcome to ensure the protection of human and labor rights in global seafood supply chains.

Introduction

Global supply chains connect consumers in the Global North with producers in the Global South. Two key attributes of global supply chains – organizational fragmentation and geographic dispersion – lead to low levels of visibility and transparency about the circumstances under which a product was produced or processed. This issue specifically resonates throughout the upstream section of seafood supply chains that can involve destructive fishing activities. Understandably, the ocean science community has focused on environmental challenges such as habitat destruction, overfishing and dwindling resources that can occur in such supply chains. These challenges threaten the viability of livelihoods and food security and create conditions for discrimination. However, there is a compelling need to connect these environmental problems to social issues such as agency, inequality, and social justice [[1], [2], [3]]. This is also reflected in an emerging interest in the labor and working conditions involved in fishing (e.g. Refs. [[4], [5], [6], [7]]. In this paper, we delve more deeply into the problem of labor abuse of – mostly migrant – fishworkers in the Thai fishing industry, also known as the Thai modern slavery crisis¹ [8], and investigate responses from the private sector to address the crisis.

Media reports published in The Guardian and the Associated Press drew attention from across the Western world as they exposed migrants being treated like slaves in Thailand's fishery industry [9,10]. This was possible because labor standards in the Thai fishing industries were not monitored and regulated by national government agencies before 2014/2015 [11]. Moreover, depleting catches in Thailand's Exclusive Economic Zone led to industrial fishing vessels traveling further afield to fish in the waters of neighboring countries, facilitating illegal fishing activity as well as human rights abuse [12]. In 2015, more than 2000 workers, mostly from Myanmar and Cambodia, were found to be held captive on the Indonesian island of Benjina and forced to work under slave-like conditions on Thai fishing boats [9]. In May of that year, the EU issued a yellow card to the Thai fishing industry with the threat of an export ban to the European market if illegal, unreported, unregulated (IUU) fishing was not adequately addressed (see also [13]. Even though the yellow card was mainly a response to IUU fishing, the European Commission explicitly added ‘associated problems [that] include human trafficking and slave labor in the fishery sector’ (European Commission, 2016)² in the aftermath of the media scandal.

Such incidents shed light on the dark side of global supply chains, when part of the production takes place in countries and sectors characterized by weaker state labor regulation [11]. While modern slavery itself is undefined by international law, it is often used as an umbrella term that focuses attention on commonalities across specific legal concepts related to human exploitation, such as forced labor, forced marriage, and human trafficking [14]. The International Labour Organization (ILO) has recently re-oriented its activities to fight against ‘forced labour, modern slavery and human trafficking’, with the concept of forced labor being used as the overarching framework.³ In this paper, we particularly focus on forced labor which is defined in the ILO Convention No. 29 (1930) as ‘all work or service which is exacted from any person under the menace of any penalty and for which the said person has not offered himself voluntarily.’ Typical forms of forced labor in the Thai fishing industry result from debt bondage, where migrant workers from Thailand's poorer neighboring countries (particularly Myanmar and Cambodia) are recruited through brokers and vessel owners who charge workers for their services [6]. These recruitment fees are often pledged from the worker's future earnings, ultimately tying the worker to its employer as the only means of repaying the debt, jeopardizing the worker's freedom [15]. Other mechanisms that bond workers to their employers are confiscation of passports and documents, withholding of wages, intimidation and violence, and the threat of denunciation to the authorities where the worker has an unresolved immigration status [16].

To combat modern slavery, several countries have issued regulations that impose greater legal responsibility on multinational corporations and lead firms for their international operations, and minimize the chance that they can do harm by infringing on universal human rights [17]. The most prominent examples are the California Transparency in Supply Chains Act, which took effect in January 2012, the UK Modern Slavery Act to address slavery and trafficking in global supply chains in 2015, the French corporate duty of vigilance law in 2017, and – most recently – the Modern Slavery Act 2018 in Australia, which was ratified by parliament in late 2018. Companies that are subject to the UK Modern Slavery Act must make ‘a statement of the steps the organization has taken during the financial year to ensure that slavery and human trafficking is not taking place in any of its supply chains, and any part of its own business, or a statement that the organization has taken no such steps’ (Modern Slavery Act 2015, s 54(4)).

While these laws have been criticized for their weak legally binding power [18], they have accelerated the momentum for global lead firms to be accountable and vouch for adherence to human and labor rights in their global supply chains. Against this background, it is imperative to understand the effectiveness of private governance in addressing modern slavery. Private governance is a term commonly used for the regulation of negative externalities of economic activity by non-state actors [19]. Despite its ‘private’ nature, it is said to perform a ‘state-like’ role as it aims to fill the regulatory vacuum in global governance through the provision of global public rules or the definition of global standards [20]. Private governance is carried out by both profit and non-profit actors that were traditionally antagonistic [21]. Using the case of fisheries in Thailand, we analyse changes that have been made by global brands and their interaction with other civil society stakeholders in this domain. Addressing human and labor rights in fishing is a global challenge, however, that extends beyond the borders of a specific country.

Our analysis of the progress made in the Thai fishing sector provides an update to those of Chantavanich et al. [6] and Marschke and Vandergeest [8] but has a stronger focus on the role of private governance during the reform. Our update is timely, as the EU decided to lift the yellow card on January 8, 2019. First, we report on the current situation based on recent surveys among fish workers from the ILO and NGOs. We conclude that state and private governance were successful in fighting extreme cases of forced labor, but a salient problem is the persistence of exploitative working conditions and the lack of a worker voice. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of actions undertaken by the private sector, we base our analysis on secondary materials as well as interviews with seafood companies, international and local civil society organizations, and intergovernmental organizations that are active in Thailand. All interviews were conducted between July 2017 and July 2019 (see appendix for an overview). Our analysis shows that for private governance to be effective it needs to integrate international labor unions and civil society partners as important functionaries that corporate entities engage with on a candid, honest and equal footing. Doing so would require a change in mindset for the corporate entities who typically view civil society and NGOs as adversaries. Private governance has its limits, however, which we outline, and these limitations need to be addressed to make the voice of workers in the Thai fishing sector truly heard.