Worked to Death: How a Chinese Tuna Juggernaut Crushed its Indonesian Workers
“One of China’s biggest tuna fishing firms, Dalian Ocean Fishing, made headlines last year when four young Indonesian deckhands fell sick and died from unknown illnesses after allegedly being subject to horrible conditions on one of its boats.
Now, an investigation by Mongabay, Tansa and the Environmental Reporting Collective shows for the first time that the abuses suffered by workers on that vessel — most commonly, being fed substandard food, given possibly dangerous drinking water and made to work excessively — were not limited to one boat, but widespread and systematic across the company’s fleet.
Moreover, migrant fishers on many boats were subject to beatings and threats to withhold pay if they did not follow orders. Many have not received their full salaries or been paid at all.
China has the world’s largest distant-water fishing fleet, and Indonesia is widely believed to be the industry’s biggest supplier of labor. In 2019 and 2020, at least 30 fishers from Indonesia died on Chinese long-haul fishing boats, often from unknown illnesses.”
