Austin, Texas, U.S.A.-based Whole Foods Market has a new set of expectations for the labor practices and human rights standards of its seafood suppliers.
The company’s new Seafood Code of Conduct, announced 28 January 2025, sets policies that are in line with the UN Guiding Principles on Buiness and Human Rights and the International Labour Organization’s (ILO) Work in Fishing Convention, mandating maximum work and time at sea hours, ethical recruitment policies, gauranteed communication access for crew members, and health and safety policies on vessels.
“Our purpose is to nourish people and the planet, and that includes people in our supply chain,” executive leader of quality standards Ann Marie Hourigan told Seafood Source, of the genesis of the program.
The new policy is meant to address persistent labor and human rights issues in the seafood industry, such as predatory recruitment schemes which exploit workers’ citizenship status; accounts of fishing crews working without access to clean water, hot food, or channels through which to communicate with their families or worker representatives are common in the industry.
In its 2022 report, for instance, the ILO estimated that 128,000 fishers were trapped in forced labor worldwide. The ILO has also found that there is a strong link between forced labor and other forms of fishery crime, such as IUU fishing.
The issue of labor injustice in the seafood supply chain has been gaining recognition in the U.S. recently. In mid January the United States Trade Representative (USTR) released a Trade Strategy to Combat Forced Labor for the first time. The program addresses the seafood industry directly, saying that a USTR priority is stopping the importation of fish caught, farmed, or processed by forced labor.
As then USTR Ambassador Katherine Tai wrote in a preface to the new strategy, U.S. trade policies have sometimes “incentivized countries to compete by maintaining or lowering standards, as companies sought to minimize costs in pursuit of efficiency.” This strategy, though it “did generate wealth,” had the downside of incentivizing the cheapest possible labor sources...
