Every Last Fish

Footnotes to myself

I’ve kept reading notes for years - quotes, ideas, etc. Some make it into my writing, but most don’t. This series is a way to use the leftovers; not quite reviews, not quite summaries - just what I underlined, and why. Enjoy.

Every Last Fish; What Fish Do for Us and What We Do to Them, by Rose George

I picked this up in the offices of The Critic, whose bookshelves I occasionally raid with great enthusiasm. Bringing it back to the pub, William Atkinson dismissed it as ‘boring’ but I quite enjoyed it - it certainly wasn’t the eco-bore book I was fearing, and a lesser author would have succumbed to writing. A read that threw up a lot of unexpected questions and interesting stories that, by and large, have passed us by.

Given the nature of this Substaq, however, I have mostly limited the selections to the chapter on the exploitation of migrants in the fishing industry;

He (a Ghanian immigrant to the UK) was surprised that he had to pay the agency about £250 ($310) to get a fishing job. Such payments are illegal under International Labour Organization's Work in Fishing Convention (ILO 183,2007), which the UK has ratified but Ghana has not. Anyway, the men would not be UK employees, although they would be working on a UK fishing vessel. Instead, they would get transit visas and be of uncertain immigration status. Transit visas are designed for transit, usually for seafarers from abroad who need to board ships in the UK that then leave its waters. In a recent brieting paper on transit visas, the International Transport Workers' Federation (ITE) called them' the starting point for the labour abuse of migrant workers working in the UK fishing industry' In 2018, it stated, every case of modern slavery in the UK fishing industry related to victims who had arrived on transit visas'. This is because a transit visa leaves them peculiarly vulnerable.

'As soon as they have "left the UK" (been on one fishing trip outside the 12-mile territorial water limit) they are no longer considered in transit.

When they return to port, they are not technically in the UK because they have not come ashore. This situation is exploited by owners to pressure migrant crew into working days off, when in port and when they are supposed to be resting. These things all increase the risk of accidents at work. They are not allowed to fish in the UK's 12-mile limit, and they are not allowed to work when they come into port. In practice, it means skippers refusing to allow their transit visa crew to disembark at all. It means the fishing boat becomes a prison.

I consider myself well-informed about migration, but had never come across this problem at all.

The United Kingdom does not keep official data on how many migrants work in the fishing industry. The Marine Accident Investigation Branch's latest annual report showed that 31 people had been injured or killed on UK-registered fishing vessels. Those are only the accidents that are reported. The IT encounters many cases where injured or dead crew members are sent home without any report being made to the MAIB, or where the report is made when the migrant is long gone. The situation back home must be absolutely incredible before they come and work in our country for what they're getting and how they're treated, says Doug Duncan, a chaplain with Stella Maris in Scotland. 'For me, it's a disgrace? Good people in fishing use this word frequently when it comes to IN Trawlers. Alastair Robertson, a skipper and boat owner in Scotland, told the BBC that it's a disgrace, anybody that abuses their crew'. He employs migrant workers, and they are paid and treated the same as anyone else. That is how it should be.

Labour can make up two-thirds of the operating costs of a fishing vessel and foreigners are cheap. A Financial Times journalist reported a social media conversation between the skipper of an Irish boat who had posted seeking crew. 'Strathmore looking [for] a man for the prawns for a trip,' the skipper wrote. 'Men are like hen's teeth,' replied a friend. 'Tell me about it,' the skipper replied. Foreign crews will go to sea when young British and European men will not.

Given the size of the UK fishing fleet the numbers of migrants involved are pretty small. But a business can cut costs and a government won’t step in to prevent it, human quantative easing will win out.