A study of tuna employee recruitment practices has found the a lack of regulations and the higher costs are key challenges to improving working conditions in the industry.
The study was conducted by London, U.K.-headquartered Impactt Limited, a human rights consultancy, and commissioned by a group of U.K. retailers and seafood industry organizations who – with the support of the U.K.-based Seafood Ethics Action Alliance (SEAA) – have committed to addressing the issue of abusive recruitment practice in the seafood industry such as fees paid to labor brokers or expenses for travel and visas.
The study focused on challenges to implementing the Employer Pays Principle (EPP), which states that employers should handle all recruitment fees, leaving employees with no debt burden from the hiring process. The EPP is widely accepted as a best practice by human and labor rights organizations, and especially important for migrant workers, who are vulnerable to forced labor if they incur debt as they travel to work.
According to the report, the tuna supply chain is “heavily reliant on migrant labor at every stage of production,” and thus heavily vulnerable to exploitation
Impactt Principal Consultant David Rousseau said that the study takes “a partnership approach, rather than a policing mindset,” hoping to meet businesses where they are to improve the sustainability and ethics of their supply chains.
In an event on the report’s publication at Seafood Expo Global, held 6 to 8 May in Barcelona, Spain, he said his research shows that the industry was making progress, thanks in part to the work of organizations like SEAA and the Global Tuna Alliance, which were helping to shape a consensus around the urgency of the issue.
Nonetheless, the study found the high cost of ethical recruitment practices and the lack of regulatory enforcement around such practices were key challenges to improving abusive recruitment schemes.
“We found that while some buyers had implemented strict or explicit commitments around EPP, generally, we found that [there was] too little regulatory pressure or commercial incentives to really go the full mile,” said Rousseau.
Rousseau pointed out that the issue was not necessarily lack of will on the part of seafood buyers, but the “very real challenges” they faced, such as the “limited leverage [that they have] with the processing sites in their supply chains, the transactional nature of the relationships, [and] the fact that there are very real commercial imperatives that means that there were reasons why those buyers would privilege working with suppliers that had lower cost points.”
He also pointed to the complexity and the scattered, expansive nature of tuna supply chains, which adds to the difficulty of monitoring and enforcement of standards.
SEA Alliance head Georgia Worrall said the businesses her organization works with are motivated to improve their supply chains, but that “they can’t be experts in everything.” Like Rousseau, she said the tuna supply chain as so complex that it requires a huge amount of personnel, expertise, and funding to navigate.
Rousseau explained said understanding a particular business’s supply chain can sometimes mean that buyers need to travel to foreign countries to actually interview workers directly. But these kinds of outlays are costly, and while some U.K. retailers have set up stringent voluntary standards with regard to human rights, smaller businesses may struggle to fund them.
Strict commitments to ethical practices like EPP, in other words, could hurt commercial goals because they required negotiating costlier deals with suppliers, or because they required human resources personnel to do extensive and costly due diligence.
Scientist and Sustainability Incubator owner Katrina Nakamura made a similar point in a 2023 op-ed for SeafoodSource, in which she argued that human rights abuses in the seafood supply chain could often be determined by a simple assessment of a company’s production numbers.
“From a decade of screening seafood supply chains for labor conditions, I can attest that trouble sets in where a business has reduced its labor cost to 5 or less percent of the cost of business, perhaps to offset rising costs like fuel” she wrote. Abuses are exacerbated, she explained, when distributors have to meet orders for an agreed upon low price, which can incentivize the use of forced or indentured labor.
At the SEG event, World Wise Foods Head of Sustainable Sourcing Rachel Munns was on hand to discuss how implementing EPP has worked at World Wise Foods, which sells sustainably sourced shelf-stable products, especially one-to-one caught pole and line canned tuna.
She said that it was important “to recognize that successful implementation of these principles relies on the engagement of those organizations and their leadership.”
