New Bedford, Massachusetts, U.S.A., is one of the busiest seafood-processing hubs in the nation, but the workforce there – largely comprising migrants from Central America – is living in constant fear of deportation, a longtime seafood processing worker who has since left the industry told SeafoodSource.
The former worker, who spoke to SeafoodSource on the condition of anonymity, said that ever since two undocumented Guatemalan men without criminal records, who were workers at New Bedford-based seafood-processing company Oceans Fleet, were taken into custody by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on 12 May, workers in the community are wondering if they will be the next ones to be arrested.
"We leave home, and we don't know if we're going to come back," the former worker said.
The separation of families, he said, is leading to both emotional and financial damage, as the vast majority of those detained are men who typically hold processing jobs with higher salaries than women who also work in the industry.
“[The Trump administration] said that they were only going to look for criminals, but they're separating a lot of families,” the former worker said. “We feel harassed. We are not criminals.”
Lisa Maya Knauer, a co-founder of New Bedford-based worker’s rights organization Centro Comunitario de Trabajadores (CCT), said that the New Bedford seafood processing sector could not run – especially at its current prices – without its Central American labor force.
“[Seafood] is the biggest industry economically in New Bedford,” Knauer said. “What are scallops going to cost if they don't have any Central Americans to work? Is it going to be USD 30 [EUR 26] a pound, USD 35 [EUR 31] a pound, USD 40 [EUR 35] dollars a pound?”
In addition to raised prices, Knauer, who is also a professor of anthropology at UMass Dartmouth, said that the sector would also find it difficult to replace jobs currently held by the largely Central American workforce, as first-generation immigrants often take on the most physically challenging jobs that others find undesirable.
“My students [at UMass Dartmouth] aren’t going to work in the fishhouses,” she said. “They didn’t get their [degrees] so they can go do the jobs that their grandparents might have done. They’re not going to work in garment factories or in cleaning and pulling clams out of the shell and cutting crabs up into pieces.”
Knauer’s work at CCT has long predated the Trump administration’s attempt to crack down on undocumented immigrants, and she said that the sector has often treated immigrant processing workers unfairly.
She said that the death of Victor Gerena, a worker at Sea Watch International who was crushed by a clam-shucking machine in 2014, inspired the CCT’s Pescando Justicia, or “Fishing for Justice,” campaign, which aims to address issues of labor injustice throughout the industry.
Knauer attributed Gerena’s death to the fact that the “safety warning [on the machine] was in English only, and he didn’t understand it.”
Since Gerena’s death, the Pescando Justicia campaign has aided seafood processing workers in their quests for labor justice. The organization has been involved in attempts to prosecute sexual harassment at a Falls River, Massachusetts packing company; those claims were later settled by another company which had purchased the Falls River company while litigation was still ongoing. Pescando Justicia also worked on a case related to suing another Falls River processor for firing a worker who had called for unionizing her workplace – though that same worker was also named in a complaint alleging she sexually harassed another worker.
However, both Knauer and the former worker said that the level of threat facing the community has reached new heights.
For example, employer retaliation was always a problem if workers reported issues, especially as many of the processing workers in New Bedford are contractually considered temporary workers, meaning they don’t have access to the same protections as salaried workers.
Workers now have the additional fear that their employers might retaliate against any complaints by reporting them to ICE, according to the former worker.
“We want to go to work, we want to do the work for the hours that they have given us, we want to make the production quotas, and we want to be able to leave work in the same condition as we entered it,” he said.
The former worker said he hoped seafood-processing companies would use their power to protect their workers to the best of their ability, and that he would not stop working to inform workers of their rights, despite the increased dangers of that endeavor.
“We are continuing with the fight,” he said. “We are continuing with the struggle.”
