A union organizer in Ireland is raising alarm over claims that Irish fishing companies are hiring undocumented Indonesian workers to cut costs, resulting in poor pay for the undocumented workers and fewer opportunities for legal fishers looking for work.
Michael O’Brien, a regional organizer with London, England-based Unite the Union, said Indonesian workers are being sent to work on Irish vessels without proper work permits through a trafficking network run by a labor agent in Indonesia which he said has undermined hard-won reforms to the permitting system currently in place for fishery workers in Ireland.
O’Brien, who worked for over three years as the Irish fisheries campaign lead at the International Transport Workers’ Federation before taking on his current role at Unite the Union, said his office has engaged with the Indonesian embassy in Ireland to affect change to no avail as of yet.
O’Brien said he wants Irish authorities to fight what he considers a “culture of repeat offending” in the Irish fishing industry, with large fines ideally handed out to fishing companies found guilty of hiring undocumented workers.
That culture has, according to O’Brien, been perpetuated by several unscrupulous operators in Ireland’s fishery industry, who are seeking to cut costs by paying undocumented workers less than the mandated EUR 34,000 (USD 37,800) fishery workers should make annually under Ireland’s work-permit scheme.
This has led to battles for labor rights across the Irish fishing industry, not just with the case of Indonesian workers.
For example, O’Brien is seeking criminal and civil penalties to recoup unpaid wages from the owner of an Irish trawler who is under investigation by several state agencies, including the Marine Survey Office and the Workplace Relations Commission, over the employment terms of a group of Ghanaian fishery workers who were rescued from the trawler, F/V Ambitious, when it sank off the west coast of Ireland earlier this year.
He told SeafoodSource that having been promised GBP 1,300 (EUR 1,547, USD 1,703) per month, the workers ultimately received “infrequent and irregular amounts.” O’Brien said he has confirmed through data access laws that payments to the Ghanaian workers totaled EUR 6,500 (USD 7,215) over nine months.
The workers, who were recently granted six months of eligibility under the country’s general work permit scheme to find a job, had been employed ostensibly to work on a U.K.-registered vessel and had no permits to work in the Republic of Ireland.
