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Sea Slavery in present-day Thailand

"Thailand is a source, destination, and transit country for men, women, and children subjected to forced labor and sex trafficking. There are reports that some of those labor trafficking victims are exploited in commercial fishing, fishing-related industries, factories, and domestic work." Forced labor, exploitation, abuse, and trafficking in Thailand's fishing industry has been widely reported, especially affecting migrants from neighboring countries, such as Myanmar, Cambodia, Laos. The issue of trafficking in Thailand has met with extensive international critique, highlighting the lack of effort to combat the problem, going so far as saying that "some Thai officials are complicit in trafficking crimes and corruption continues to undermine anti-trafficking efforts".

Overview
The issue of slavery within Thai fisheries has been given increased domestic and international attention after it was revealed by media outlets, such as The Guardian, The New York Times, Associated Press, and Al Jazeera, how cruel practices of coercion, violence, torture, and even murder, were widely reported experiences among migrant workers. Thailand is the third-largest seafood exporter globally, producing 3.8 million tons of seafood every year, 71% of which is exported. The country’s exports include seafood products that are common in the region, such as shrimp, tuna, squid, crab, lobster, etc., but an additional commodity is the so-called ‘trash-fish’ export: small, inedible fish and fish by-products which is used for livestock animal feed and household pet food.

Forced labour, as defined by the International Labour Organization in its Forced Labour Convention, is “all work or service under the menace of any penalty and for which the said person has not offered himself voluntarily”, although the ILO now recognizes that “many victims enter forced labour situations initially out of their own choice, albeit through fraud and deception, only to discover later that they are not free to withdraw their labour, owing to legal, physical or psychological coercion. Initial consent may be considered irrelevant when deception or fraud has been used to obtain it”.

According to the International Labor Organization an estimated 11% of the global population suffering under forced labor are found within the agriculture and fisheries industry. Although maritime slavery is a widespread issue in Southeast Asia, little academic focus has been on the issue, due to little research on hired labor in the global south in general and due to the fact that most research on slavery focuses on the sex industry.

Migrant labor exploitation
Migrant workers, especially from Cambodia and Myanmar, are among the most vulnerable groups to become victims of forced labor at sea. A survey of fishery workers in Thailand by the ILO found that 95% of respondents were transborder migrants, and other studies have shown that most low-paying jobs in the sector are occupied by migrant workers. The most common method of exploitation has been found to be through deceitful broker recruitment and entrapment through debt-bondage.

Migrant workers have been found to suffer horrible working conditions within the Thai fishery sector, being grossly underpaid, and often working in involuntary debt-bondage. It has been reported that many of these migrants enter the industry voluntarily but are subsequently unable to leave. Traffickers recruit workers from Thailand’s neighboring countries with the promise of work and decent wages. This process is facilitated with the bribery of government officials at the border. Once the migrants arrive at the docks, they are sold to ship captains for approximately $600 to $900 each, and the captains tell the migrants that they are indebted to an amount of $1500 to $2500 for the trouble of border-crossing. With the Thai minimum wage, it takes several months, maybe even years, to work off this debt.

Another specific group of exploited people are the stateless Rohingya people, a lot of whom have fled their place of origin in Myanmar and seek safety in the nearest predominantly Muslim nations in the region, Malaysia and Indonesia. The Thai region between Myanmar and Malaysia has become an area of Rohingya-trafficking and exploitation, in which the victims are recruited deceitfully through the promise of decent work but end up working as sea slaves.

Causes
Poorly regulated overfishing in the Gulf of Thailand has led to a depletion of its marine environment, substantially reducing catch rates for fisheries, is something that has been associated with the increased use of hired labor in the area. Rising fuel costs have pressured fisheries further, reducing wages, which has led to less locals seeking work in the sector. Other factors, such as wholesale price of shrimp dropping and an outbreak of early mortality syndrome in the Thai shrimp sector in 2012, have had severe consequences for the seafood economy of Thailand. With overall seafood consumption continuously growing globally, labor exploitation has become an essential component of the competitiveness of the Thai seafood industry.

It is not unusual for ships to register under so-called “flags of convenience”, like Panama, Belize, or the Cayman Islands, which have leaner regulation and therefore makes it easier to escape criminal liability.

Research has shown an association between distant-water fisheries and prevalence of labor abuse, as those workers who have better opportunity to abandon their employers at port also possess more positive influence on their working conditions. In addition to this, different studies have shown that forced labor is most commonly found on-board trawlers compared to other vessels operating in the area.

Slavery at sea has remained a hidden reality for some time because of 1) it occurs in isolation at sea, 2) not all exploited laborers perceive themselves as actual victims of slavery but see the harsh circumstances as a part of what the job entails, and 3) government officials do not always perceive these crimes as cases of human trafficking.

A survey made by the International Organization for Migration from 2014 containing interviews with 1700 different workers on vessels registered in Thailand, who were subsequently rescued or detained in Indonesia, showed that 86% of the workers described their work experience as being consistent with what they expected at recruitment, while still reporting excessive working hours, lack of sufficient nutrition, and in general poor conditions of living. This might indicate that workers in the region associate fisheries with brutal working conditions. This is also consistent with the fact that conditions of most fisheries in Southeast Asia in general are below what which is accepted by international standards.

Responses
International attention to the stories of slavery in Thai fisheries after the media revelations of 2014 put pressure on Thailand’s newly installed military government, who had promised after its 2014 coup d’état to rid the country of corruption. The government enacted regulations on migrant work registration and policies on labor regulations in the seafood industry, e.g. the requirement of registering all migrant workers, providing basic health care, and regulating work contracts and maximum work hours. The government also created so-called ‘port-in, port-out’ inspection centers coordinated by the Thai Navy, to inspect all vessels and on-board workers for their adherence to regulations. Effort was made to make sure these regulations met international standards.

The ILO did a comparative analysis of survey results from 2012 and 2017 to identify the impact of the 2014-2015 labor reform, which indicated that matters were improving: increasingly workers signed written contracts for the work they performed, and gross wages had increased. Although the labor regulations were positively received, there has been some critique of the actual enforcement of the laws by groups such as Human Rights Watch.

International Involvement
The US Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act from 2000 (TVPA) is internationally thought of as one of the most comprehensive legal mechanisms to combat domestic human trafficking. In addition to this, TVPA promulgates mechanisms of sanction against states that fail to meet standards of trafficking elimination. The framework of TVPA includes evaluation of foreign countries’ effort to combat trafficking and groups them into different tiers (from 1 to 3) thereafter; tier 1 showing adequate efforts and tier 3 being descriptive of countries that neither fully comply with nor make any viable effort to meet the minimum standard set by the Act (Ibid). Thailand held a place on Tier 2 from 2010-2013 but was downgraded to Tier 3 in 2014-2015. This was a judgement assessed on the basis of the three main concepts that define the legal framework of forced labour at sea: 1) Fishery regulation, 2) labor, and 3) human trafficking.

The European Union has issued a so-called ‘yellow warning card’ to Thailand in their programme to block purchases from IUU fisheries (Illegal, Unreported and unregulated fishing), stating that labor abuse needs to be addressed within the industry. The EU carding programme from 2010 issues ‘yellow’ warning cards, and those who are issued ‘red’ cards are banned from exporting seafood to the EU, if they do not limit the level of IUU fishing. Since 2014, labor regulation has become a factor in the assessment of IUU fishing in addition to fisheries management in general.