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Yusril's IMS contract Photograph by Sanjit Das for Bloomberg Businessweek
The Melilla 201 fishing boat in dry dock at the Port of Lyttleton Photograph by Jocelyn Carlin for Bloomberg Businessweek
Henry Demone, High Liner’s CEO, said that he “abhorred” slavery and labor abuse, and that his company “tries very hard to do the right thing.” “In the case you’re talking about, we bought from a company whose labor practices in the [processing] plant were fine. We audited that. We didn’t audit the fishing vessels. But we relied upon a well-known New Zealand-based company and their assurance of 100% observer coverage.
It is unclear exactly how much seafood caught by indentured fishermen ends up on the plates of American consumers. Public shipping records—which do not report seafood imported on planes, and only detail some seafood imported to the United States by boat—are sparse, and seafood distributors rarely disclose their specific suppliers. Alastair Macfarlane, a representative of New Zealand’s Seafood Industry Council, declined to comment on which American companies might be buying fish from troubled vessels, such as the Melilla 203.
However, an analysis of several sources of data — including New Zealand fishery species quota, and foreign-vessel catch totals made available by the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry — suggests roughly 40 percent of squid exported from New Zealand is caught on one of the vessels using coerced labor. Perhaps 15 percent of all New Zealand hoki exports may be slave-caught, and 8 percent of the country’s Southern Blue Whiting catch may be tainted.
Despite the prevalence of the foreign-chartered vessels, which in 2010 earned $274.6 million in export revenue and hauled in 62.3 percent of New Zealand’s deepwater catch, some New Zealand companies have determined that they are not worth the risk. “The reputational damage is immeasurable,” said Andrew Talley, director of Talley’s, New Zealand’s third largest fishing company, which submits to third-party social responsibility audits on its labor standards, a condition of its contract to supply McDonald’s with hoki for its Filet-O-Fish sandwiches. “New Zealand seafood enjoys a hard earned and world leading reputation as a responsible fisheries manager, with a product range and quality to match. There is nothing responsible at all about using apparently exploitative and abusive FCVs.”
The main thoroughfare that bisects Yusril’s Central Java village from the sea feeds into a chain of divided toll ways that run all the way to Jakarta. Travelers along the road quickly leave the briny air of the fishing kampungs and pass through green rice paddies, punctuated with water buffaloes and trees bearing swollen, spiky jackfruit. Sixty years ago, Yusril’s grandfather worked that land. Today, like the fishermen, thousands travel along that highway to seek new lives. Some women and girls only make it as far as the roadside karaoke bars, where they enter prostitution. Others make it further, only to become coerced domestic servants in the Middle East. For them, that divided highway is a boulevard of broken dreams.
When I found him last December, Yusril was back in his in-laws’ modest home, tucked well off of a side road. He was out of work, and brainstorming ways to scratch out a living by returning to his father’s trade, farming. IMS, the recruiting agency in Jakarta, had blacklisted him, and was refusing to return his birth certificate, his basic safety training credentials or his family papers. Additionally, the agents were withholding pay, totaling around $1100. In total, Yusril had been paid an average of 50 cents per hour he worked on the Melilla 203. An IMS attorney did not respond to repeated emails requesting comment. When I showed up at the agency’s offices, a security guard escorted me out.
Two of the 24 men who walked off the Melilla 203 returned to work on the ship, rather than face deportation. The ship’s representatives flew the remaining 22 resisters back to Indonesia. When they returned to Central Java, they say that IMS coerced them into signing documents waiving their claims to redress for human rights violations, in exchange for their originally stipulated payments of between $500 to $1,000.
Yusril was one of two who held out. On January 21, when I last spoke to him, I asked him why he had refused to sign the document. “Dignity,” Yusril said, pointing to his heart.
E. Benjamin Skinner is a senior fellow at the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism of Brandeis University. Additional reporting was provided by Sophie Elsner.
