September 22, 2016 — Foreign crew members reportedly working in slave-like conditions for monthly wages as low as $350 would not have found their way onto Hawaii’s longline fishing boats without an exemption carved into the law almost 30 years ago, according to longtime industry leaders, federal officials and government records.
Today, almost all the vessels in the longline fleet have entirely foreign crews.
It wasn’t always that way.
As the Cold War was coming to an end in the late 1980s, there was a push to “Americanize” the country’s fishing fleets by instituting requirements similar to those imposed under the Jones Act on vessels engaged in coastwise trade — namely, that U.S.-flagged ships be built in the U.S. and crewed by U.S. citizens.
Congress passed a bipartisan bill to that effect, and President Ronald Reagan signed it in 1988 as the Commercial Fishing Industry Vessel Anti-Reflagging Act.
But the legislation exempted commercial fishermen fishing for highly migratory species, such as tuna and swordfish, from the law’s requirement that U.S. citizens comprise at least 75 percent of each crew.
At about the same time, the longline industry — then comprised of just a few dozen vessels — and more established purse seiners were leaving the West Coast to set up shop in Hawaii and Pacific Island territories.
They left because of depleted stocks and, in the case of purse seiners, pressure to stop killing so many dolphins.
The purse seiners were setting their huge nets, up to 500 yards deep, around schools of tuna near pods of dolphins. It created a national controversy that led to new restrictions and “dolphin-safe” tuna.
The longline boats, which catch fish by extending miles of line with thousands of hooks, initially remained strictly crewed by U.S. citizens. This changed as the fleet grew and it became harder to find local residents willing to work on the boats. Fuel prices also soared after Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, adding to operational costs.
This spurred the longliners to take advantage of the foreign-crew exemption that had been pushed by members of Congress from the West Coast who were looking after the purse seiners’ interests, said Jim Cook, who co-owns several longline fishing vessels, a marine supply store and fish restaurant at Pier 38 in Honolulu.
“It slowly infiltrated our fleet,” he said.
The longline industry now includes roughly 140 vessels, nearly all of which are ported in Honolulu, and most have entirely foreign crews, according to industry leaders and federal officials.