Financial Times: “The scheme gives workers a key role in establishing, monitoring and enforcing their own employment rights.”

“Unlike many voluntary corporate social responsibility schemes, the pilot programme is based on legally binding agreements between employers and buyers that incentivise adherence and are audited by an independent council.”

Press Release: Europe’s first Worker-Driven Social Responsibility pilot launched in UK- quotes from key partners:

Chris Williams, International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF) fisheries expert: “This pilot project gives migrant fishers working on some of these vessels a chance for greater protection and improved conditions at work, as well as the ability to shape their own working conditions, despite the continued use of seafarer’s transit visa to recruit them. We hope this pilot will be successful and expand over time to ensure all workers, regardless of their nationality or immigration status, are paid fairly and treated with respect for the difficult work they do.”

Mike Park OBE, Chief Executive of the Scottish White Fish Producers Association Limited:“It is important that the welfare and well-being of all crew operating on UK fishing vessels is protected to the highest standards possible, that is why we are excited by the potential this initiative delivers. Having visited the Fair Food Programme and the Coalition of Immokalee Workers in their place of operation in the tomato fields of Florida, I have great hope that we can replicate the same supporting network here in the UK for all fishermen and fisherwomen.”

Julia Black, Chair of the Seafood Ethics Action Alliance & Group Ethics & Social Sustainability Senior Manager at Hilton Foods: “The development of a worker-driven social responsibility pilot within a UK fishery is an exciting marker for our industry. As a pre-competitive collaboration of UK retailers and seafood businesses, we work to ensure respect for human rights our global seafood supply chains. We are interested to see this powerful methodology in action in Scotland to improve experiences of fishers in the UK. We are encouraged by the different stakeholders working together to forge this groundbreaking partnership.”

The Coalition of Immokalee Workers is pleased to announce the official launch of a new Worker-driven Social Responsibility program for workers in the historic UK seafood industry!

The program is modeled after the groundbreaking Fair Food Program, the world’s first WSR program, and the launch of the pilot this spring in northeast Scotland in collaboration with the Scottish White Fish Producers Association (SWFPA) comes after nearly two years of careful planning and discussion with the International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF), fishers’ human rights expert Dr. Jess Sparks with Tufts University, the UK-based human rights organization Focus on Labour Exploitation (FLEX), and the Seafood Ethics Action Alliance (SEA Alliance), who together form a powerful and unique partnership of worker organizations, human and labor rights experts, suppliers, and corporate buyers. 

The pilot program is being launched for an initial period of two years, and is then planned to expand to protect thousands more fishers in Scotland and beyond.

Thirty years ago when farmworkers came together in Immokalee in protest against inhumane working conditions and poverty wages in Florida’s fields, their efforts marked the birth of a new kind of model for protecting human rights in corporate supply chains, a model today know as Worker-driven Social Responsibility, or WSR.  It is an approach forged by workers themselves, rooted in their lived experience and monitored and enforced by thousands of workers every day in every corner of the workplace, backed by the purchasing power of the major buyers of the products they harvest, assemble, or, with today’s news, pull from the sea.

And as detailed investigations by the Financial Times reveal — as well countless studies and reports published by human rights experts, including project partner Dr. Jess Sparks of Tufts University — the working conditions of fishers in the UK are all too similar to those farmworkers faced in the US before the Fair Food Program, and require the same kind of enforceable protections offered by WSR programs like the FFP.  This pilot program will not only provide a meaningful way for fishers to report issues and safeguard their rights and dignity at sea, it will also reduce risk and increase sustainability for vessel owners and food retailers along the length of the entire supply chain. 

To learn more about the pilot program, make sure to read the Financial Times’ coverage of it below. 

UK seafood industry cracks down on exploitation of overseas crew

Two-year scheme sets new standards for pay and working conditions on British boats

By Antonia Cundy – January 9, 2024

The UK seafood sector has launched Europe’s first “worker-driven” scheme to tackle the exploitation of migrant crew on British fishing boats by setting minimum standards for pay and working conditions.

The two-year pilot will be run by labour rights groups in partnership with the Seafood Ethics Action Alliance (SEA Alliance), a consumer group whose members represent 95 per cent of the UK seafood market and include Tesco, Asda, Morrisons and Whitby Seafoods. 

The scheme gives workers a key role in establishing, monitoring and enforcing their own employment rights. It aims to address a lack of labour legislation for crew created by an immigration “loophole” that denies those who work in international waters the protection of UK employment law. 

Chris Williams, fisheries expert at the ITF, said the project gives migrant fishers “a chance for greater protection and improved conditions at work, as well as the ability to shape their own working conditions”. 

The attempt to clean up labour standards comes after criticism of the seafood industry’s systemic dependence on low-paid migrant crew and a series of labour abuse scandals that have rocked the sector in recent years. 

Experts estimate that more than 1,200 overseas crew on British boats are employed through “transit visas”, which in recent decades have been adopted by some employers seeking to evade UK employment law.

Transit visas give an individual a fixed period of time to enter and pass through the UK to a place outside the country and are intended for use by merchant seafarers, such as those boarding a cargo ship bound for another country. 

A Financial Times investigation last year highlighted the mistreatment of vulnerable overseas crew under the system, which human rights lawyers have argued facilitates modern slavery.

The government has in recent years introduced legislation to crack down on boats misusing transit visas. The Nationalities and Borders Act 2022 requires employers to apply for skilled worker visas in order to hire migrant crew in UK waters. 

But many boats are exempt because they fish beyond the 12-nautical mile territorial limit. The pilot programme promises to fill the gaps in legislation for this group of workers by guaranteeing minimum standards over pay, rest hours and grievance procedures.

The programme will run out of two ports in north east Scotland in partnership with the Scottish White Fish Producers Association, the largest fish producer group in Europe. 

Unlike many voluntary corporate social responsibility schemes, the pilot programme is based on legally binding agreements between employers and buyers that incentivise adherence and are audited by an independent council.

The agreements are expected to be in place by the second quarter of this year, according to a person close to the discussions.  

The programme has been launched by Focus on Labour Exploitation (Flex), a non-profit group, the International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF) and the Fair Food Programme. (end)

FLEX also released more details on how the program will work, as well as how WSR is being adapted to meet the needs of fishers. Here are links to several more resources on the pilot launch:

You can read the blog post in its entirety here: 

Announcement: Europe’s first Worker-Driven Social Responsibility initiative launches pilot to fight the exploitation of workers at sea

January 9, 2024

FLEX, ITF and the Fair Food Program are pleased to announce the launch of a groundbreaking new programme which seeks to build worker-driven, market-enforced mechanisms and systems to improve working conditions in the UK fishing industry, following the exposure of widespread migrant labour exploitation.

Following an intensive twelve-month planning phase, the two-year pilot programme will now launch in Scotland, delivered by Focus on Labour Exploitation (FLEX) in partnership with the the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) and in consultation with International Transport Workers Federation (ITF), the Fair Food Standards Council and Dr. Jess Sparks, Assistant Professor at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University. The project will involve collaboration among several key stakeholders including retailers, vessel owners, human rights experts, and local community organisations.

Supply chain problems for UK fishing

Working in what is widely known to already be a harsh and dangerous working environment, migrant fishers are often left exposed and vulnerable to the risks of labour abuse and exploitation while at sea on British vessels. 

In recent years, the UK fishing industry has been beset with scandals and reports of the mistreatment of fishing vessel workers, including many reported concerns about systemic issues with pay inequalities, excessive working hours, physical violence, labour abuses and exploitative immigration schemes, as explored in previous blogs.

The reality of life for migrant fishers, (who predominantly come from the Philippines, Ghana and Indonesia, and working in UK territorial waters and the Exclusive Economic Zone, was exposed in the research findings of Dr Sparks in 2022 and in a vivid and harrowing piece of investigative journalism published by the Financial Times in 2023.

Both publications drew attention to the immigration loophole of the seafarer’s ‘transit-visa’ which is overly relied upon by the domestic fishing industry as a means of hiring migrant workers at low-cost but denies these workers the protection of UK employment laws. Migrant fishers recruited into the UK on the transit-visa are not legally allowed to enter UK landed territory without special permission, and therefore in practice are often unable to access basic services and necessities including medical care.

Despite regulatory action and attempts to improve employment regulations for those working at sea in UK territorial waters, the reality has been the creation of a three-tier system where national and migrant fishers working within 12 nautical miles should be guaranteed basic employment rights, but many migrant fishers continue to be employed on vessels outside of the 12 nautical mile-limit on transit-visas, with no guaranteed UK minimum wage payment for the hours they work. 

Some measures have been taken to make the fishing industry compliant with UK immigration law, for example unclassified fishing occupations were added to the Shortage Occupation List in July 2023. Yet such measures have been brought into effect with little-to-no engagement with workers themselves or worker-representative organisations, and cannot be said to address the serious concerns of working conditions and worker exploitation that blight the UK fishing industry. The Government has also recently announced the scrapping of the Shortage Occupation List which threatens to remove this provision altogether.

What is WSR?

Worker-driven Social Responsibility (WSR) is an exciting model for tackling labour abuse and exploitation in corporate supply chains, with more than a decade of proven results in industries ranging from agriculture to textiles. The model is designed to address the power imbalances that exist between workers and employers, as well as between buyers and suppliers, imbalances that drive many of the abuses found at the base of global supply chains today.

WSR involves a group of workers jointly establishing, monitoring, and enforcing their own rights. This is backed by legally-binding agreements between the workers and the companies at the top of supply chains that harness the purchasing power of those companies, to incentivise rights compliance. FLEX’s 2020 research paper explored the benefits that implementing a WSR model could have when tackling labour abuse in UK supply chains, particularly where there is a heavy use of out-sourced labour.

A WSR pilot for UK Fishing

This WSR programme for UK fishing is an ambitious project that is the first of its kind in Europe. 

It will build upon learnings and examples from existing WSR programmes from across the world, such as the Fair Food Programme and the Bangladesh Accord. The Fair Food Programme was launched in the US in 2011 by one of the new UK pilot’s key partners, the CIW, and was a ground-breaking partnership that pioneered the Worker-driven Social Responsibility model. It presented a market-driven, scalable, and adaptable blueprint for protecting workers’ human rights that will be heavily drawn upon in the new UK pilot programme.

The pilot project has secured funding from Humanity United to run for an initial two-year period starting from December 2023. It will be implemented in the North East of Scotland region, and begin with outreach work with migrant fishers and active engagement with key industry stakeholders in two key ports.

We are currently recruiting for an Outreach and Engagement Manager and two Outreach Workers for the project, descriptions of the roles and responsibilities can be found here. 

That’s all for now on this exciting news.  And be sure to check back again soon for more news from Scotland as the launch process continues to advance in the months ahead!