November 18, 2023 — Katrina Nakamura is an interdisciplinary scientist and the owner of the Sustainability Incubator, which has screened conditions in over 500 seafood supply chains and trained over 80 suppliers in human rights due diligence using a service called Labor Safe Screen. Previously, Nakamura co-owned and operated six seafood restaurants located at fishing wharves.
If you’ve worked in seafood, then you know firsthand that handling fish or shellfish is physically-intensive work on a slippery surface with a knife or gear in your hands. You may share experiences with today’s frontline seafood workers like the intensity of working a frontline or the pride of being paid for what you produced.
But that could be where a common experience ends, because today’s typical wages are around USD 200 (EUR 183) per month. 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. Forced and indentured labor occur where producers or distributors are advantage-taking, heavily, to meet orders for an agreed low price – like where shrimp is routed through a middleman paying wages of USD 0.02 (EUR 0.01) per pound, for example, for peeling shrimp or picking crabs in an unregistered operation, and also taking wage deductions for boots and gear and a biased scale.