Thai and Burmese workers sort fish at Mahachai port in Samut Sakhon, Thailand. Pic: AP.
Human Rights Watch released a statement last week criticising the Thai military government’s plan to put convicts to work in the nation’s fishing industry, which is notorious for employing trafficked people in harsh, dangerous conditions.
On December 4 Thai Labour Minister Gen. Surasak Kanchanrat announced that 176 prisoners with less than a year to serve will, if they agree, be put to work on Thai fishing boats.
Brad Adams, Asia Director at Human Rights Watch, said: “It is dangerously irresponsible for the Labor Ministry to urge prisoners to work on board Thailand’s notoriously abusive fishing fleets.”
According to the statement research has shown that work on Thai fishing vessels is extremely abusive. It said: “Problems include widespread and systematic use of forced labor, frequent physical abuse leading in some cases to extrajudicial killings, excessive work hours ranging up to 20 hours per day, non-payment of wages, inadequate food and medical services, and dangerous working conditions causing many injuries.”
Thailand is the world’s third largest exporter of seafood and a Thai Labour Ministry spokesman said the move to use convicts was aimed at addressing the shortage of people wiling to work on the fishing boats.
As it is most of the labourers on the boats are not there of their own free will, having been trafficked or more often just duped into the work. The majority of the workers are foreign with many coming from Burma (Myanmar).
Many of the Burmese willingly go to Thailand having been promised jobs with good wages and far better conditions. In reality they end up doing backbreaking shifts on fishing boats without any pay for nearly a year, work none of them would have volunteered for.
Aung Myat Soe a Burmese journalist who previously worked with civil society organisations that help Burmese fishermen in Thailand explained how the men ended up in such situations.
Many of the men come from poor, remote rural villages in Burma where the most they can realistically expect to earn is 70,000 kyat (approx. US$70).
Burmese brokers will come to their village and tell the men that they can find them reasonable work in Thailand such as work in factories, restaurants or as servants. They also promise them that they will be paid 10,000 baht (approx. $300USD) a month. The brokers never mention working on fishing boats because they know that the villagers would refuse to go to Thailand to do such work.
The workers are usually penniless so the broker tells them that he or she will pay their expenses, such as food and transport up front, which will then be deducted from their wages.
Once they have a group of about 10 workers together they take them to the Burmese side of the Burma Thai border. There the workers are handed over to second broker who pays off their ‘debts’ to the first broker.
Usually by this stage each worker will have accrued debts of about 4,000 baht (approx. US$120) even though it will have cost the broker no more than about 1,000 baht (approx. US$30) to get the worker to the border.
The second broker then smuggles the workers across the border and sells them and their ‘debts’ to another broker, usually a Thai, not too far from the border.
The second broker will want to recoup the 4,000 baht they originally paid for the worker and make their own profit. Again their actual costs will have been in the region of 1,000 to 2,000 baht but they will claim costs of about 11,000 baht (approx. US$335) and charge the next broker about 15,000 baht (approx. $455USD) for each worker.
The third broker will then usually transport the workers to Samut Sakhon, Thailand’s major fishing hub just west of Bangkok. There they will sell the workers and their ‘debt’ onto trawler operators. They will add a further 10,000 to 15,000 baht onto the workers expense bill and charge 25,000 to 30,000 baht (approx. US$760-$915) for each worker.
The workers are told they will have to work on the fishing boats for free until their debt is paid off.
Wages on the fishing boats are far less than the 10,000 baht a month the workers were promised. On average they can expect to get paid about 3,000 baht a month, little more than they would have earned if they had stayed at home with their families and done an easier, less dangerous job. At these rates of pay they will normally have to work for free for about 10 months to a year to pay off their ‘expenses’.
Once the workers are delivered to the ports they have very little choice in what happens to them. The ports are run by local mafia and are lawless places where even the Thai police fear to go. Even if they could find a policeman most workers would be too scared to speak to them because they are illegal immigrants.
On the boats there are usually four men who control the workers, often the Thai ones have guns. They will usually be the captain, the helmsman, the sonar operator and the workers’ overseer. The first three are usually Thai, but the overseer can be a waged Burmese person who has worked on the boats for a long time and gained the trust of the boat operators.
Once at sea the workers know that their bosses can behave with impunity and even go so far as to kill them and dump the bodies overboard, safe in the knowledge that they are unlikely to face any consequences. Also many of the boats get resupplied at sea and can stay at sea for months meaning the workers have very few chances to escape.
Once the workers have repaid their debts 80 to 90 percent of them leave the fishing boats to be replaced by new workers with debts to pay off. Most return to Burma but some will try to find less dangerous work in Thailand, but as they are illegal immigrants this can be hard.
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