More than 130 people from at least 17 countries participated in the three-day International Conference on Fisher’s Welfare in Taichung City, Taiwan, this past May. The conference was organized and hosted by Maryknoll Father Joyalito Tajonera, who serves as the director of Stella Maris-Taiwan.
Stella Maris is the Catholic Church’s Apostolate of the Sea, which serves people who live, work or have a connection to the sea. The plight of fishers is particularly fraught, since workers are isolated aboard vessels under their employers’ control. The inordinate power that employers hold over employees’ lives at sea can lead to severe abuse.
A Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative report by The Associated Press in 2016 found that some seafood sold in supermarkets in the United States had been caught and processed by enslaved workers, mostly from Myanmar and Cambodia, on boats off the coast of Thailand. The report describes seven-day workweeks of 18 to 20–hour workdays; inadequate food; blatant disregard for basic medical needs; hazardous and life-threatening conditions; and routine beating and even torture. Some workers are trapped at sea on large fishing vessels for years.
Father Tajonera, who is originally from the Philippines, ministers to Filipino migrants working in Taiwan. Over two decades, he has established a migrant shelter and a thriving Filipino Catholic community. In recent years, his organization has initiated investigations into forced labor and wage theft. It has helped return more than $4 million to approximately 1,000 workers. It has also restored thousands of documents confiscated by employers to prevent migrant workers from leaving exploitative job placements.
At the May conference, labor union leaders from Indonesia spoke about their efforts to protect fishers’ human rights and labor rights. A seafood campaign organizer with the organization Global Labor Justice also detailed his work to protect fishers’ rights to access Wi-Fi and health care while at sea.
A fisher named Hadi described his experience under a boss who withheld access to Wi-Fi, cutting off workers’ communication with the outside world and blocking the fishers’ access to medical care when sick or injured. The boss extorted more work from the employees in return for access to these essential services.
As the largest importer in the world, the United States is in a unique position to demand information on the production of the food we consume and goods we use every day.
As Catholics, we vehemently oppose human trafficking and modern-day slavery as a violation of human dignity. Cardinal Stephen Brislin, archbishop of Capetown, South Africa, offered the Fisher’s Welfare Conference a mission that might well be extended to world leaders: “See workers at sea not as commodities, but rather as individual persons made in the image and likeness of God who strive for agency over their own lives, the means to support their families and themselves with dignity.”
Thomas Gould is communications manager for the Maryknoll Office for Global Concerns.
FAITH IN ACTION:
• Read more about Father Tajonera’s ministry https://mogc.info/FisherWelfare1 and https://mogc.info/FisherWelfare2
• Learn more about the USCCB Coalition of Organizations and Ministries Promoting the Abolition of Slavery at Sea. https://mogc.info/COMPASS
The Maryknoll Office for Global Concerns, based in Washington, D.C., is a resource for Maryknoll on matters of peace, social justice and integrity of creation, and brings Maryknoll’s mission experience into U.S. policy discussions. Phone (202) 832-1780, visit www.maryknollogc.org or email ogc@maryknollogc.org.
Feature imaged: Stella Maris volunteers Cecilia Huang and Roberto Canta (in yellow vests) approach crew members aboard a cargo ship docked in Manila, the Philippines. (Courtesy of Joyalito Tajonera/Taiwan)
