This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Mel Buer: On today’s episode of working people, we’re going beyond the borders of the US and training our focus on the International Workers who keep the world’s global economy running. To start this conversation, I thought it would be important to bring on someone who’s been doing the important work of giving a platform to the workers who make these global industries run. I want to talk to her about her life and research and dig into the important work that she is doing now.
So with us today to help us get that conversation rolling, is Judy Gearheart, research professor with the accountability Research Center at American University, and host of the Labor Link Podcast, a podcast about the brave individuals organizing the workers who make our stuff. With decades of experience collaborating with organizers and rights advocates supporting worker struggles in the Global South, Judy is uniquely positioned to bring the stories of these workers forth to her listeners from their website. The labor link podcast touches on many aspects of the global economy, trade policy, international development programs, corporate accountability and the international human rights norms meant to protect workers from abuse. The first Labor Link podcast series featured organizers leveraging transnational campaigns to build power, and this second series is on fisher driven solutions to the seafood industry, featuring interviews with fisher organizers from around the world who are overcoming challenges and using creative strategies to advance fishers rights in the global fishing industry. Thank you so much for being on the show today. Judy, I’m really excited to have this conversation.
Judy Gearhart: Thank you so much. Mel, I really appreciate you and Max having me on.
MB: How did the last couple decades of organizing in nonprofit work bring you to this current research?
JG: I think I started about 30 years ago actually doing organizing work in Mexico. When I went to Mexico and met people who were organizing workers and the workers themselves, I just fell in love with the movement. I fell in love with these people who are trying to do good in the world, but they’re also trying to build power for the people who don’t have it. And I really found their campaigns and their struggle compelling.
MB: So the work that you do with the research center, then is really kind of doing these interviews, talking to these workers gathering this information and trying to present it to not just academic audiences, but, translate this into potential policy objectives for the various organizations that you work with. Is that kind of a good understanding of the kind of work that you’re doing now?
JG: Yeah, everything we do is trying to bridge between the global policy, trade or corporate policies, and what the workers on the ground are actually doing.
MB: Let’s talk about this second series. This is focusing on fisher organizers and the advancement of workers rights in both large and small scale fishing industries from around the world. I believe in your last episode, you were talking to fishers in Indonesia. Can you share a little bit about the conditions that they’re currently laboring under?
JG: Global fisheries, many of them are at capacity or over fished, and environmentally there’s a struggle to make them sustainable. So environmental advocates around the world have been working on this for a long time. In 2014 major media outlets came out with a series of stories about forced labor on the Thai fleet. And then there were also stories appearing about forced labor on the Chinese fleet, the Taiwanese fleet, vessels showing up in South Africa, in Australia, Indonesian migrant fishers just walking off the vessel, saying, “We’ve been slaves on that vessel. Help us.” Or other vessels that were pulled aside for illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing.
So the story that I have is from SPMI in Indonesia, the largest migrant worker union in Indonesia. They were asked to go and help the fishers who were stranded in South Africa. And then what they discovered is the Indonesian government, the way the laws were set up, they couldn’t get these fishers the support they needed. And so then that began a whole body of work for them.
Globally, starting around 2014 with all of these exposes, the global community started to mobilize. And they really started reacting to forced labor on these vessels, and it is horrific. There are stories of fishers stranded at sea for 15 years. There are others who are out there for more and then, of course, there are others who don’t come back. Killed at sea, or they die from an illness at sea, and then their body is buried at sea, which is something that’s very traumatic for a lot of these people.
The campaigns that have surged from there have focused a lot on forced labor and illegal fishing, and it’s really brought a lot more work to support fishers and migrant fishers. There’s so much work to be done just to address that forced labor however, the thing I got from talking with people is we can rescue forced labor victims for decades to come, but it’ll never stop happening until we organize the fishers, until we enable them to stand up to the captain. We enable them to get remedy when they’re not paid, and we enable them to build the social movement that challenges these laws.
MB: As more concerted organizing has been happening over the last 10 years or so, have there been some campaigns that you’ve spoken with fishers about, that they consider to be successes or effective?
JG: The first couple interviews I did are with the International Transport Workers Federation and the Fisher Rights Network in Thailand. The ITF has been helping to set up at port and at multiple ports in Thailand, Fisher organizations and so the Fisher Rights Network is growing again, as I said, they’re not able to form a union technically, but that doesn’t keep them from forming basically a worker center and from pursuing negotiations with the employers.
What’s happening a lot in this space is you have a lot of funding and a lot of people with good will who are focused on the forced labor. And it’s important work. If you have been forced to be at sea for two years and you haven’t been paid. Or if you have a family member stranded at sea and you just want to get them back, it’s absolutely crucial.
We need that work, but that work needs to connect in. And you have a lot of NGOs that do that work that don’t necessarily connect in. So there are some efforts now to connect these pieces together.
And I think with migrant fishers, it’s a challenge to learn how to organize. They don’t come from organizing backgrounds for the most part. And so how do you bring this consciousness of what it means to organize, what it means to work with your fellow fishers?
I think a lot of people beyond the labor movement don’t fully appreciate what it takes to organize. The day in, day out, and what it means to have your momentum crushed by a fake solution. And that’s what’s happening a lot in global supply chain solutions. So, yes, absolutely, we want to get remedy for fishers who have been victims of forced labor. Yes, we want to rescue victims of forced labor, but we need to build from there to the next step of enabling fishers to defend each other, right?
MB: One comparison that I keep coming up in as we’re talking about this, particularly about migrant status, about language barriers, about the barriers to really free movement on these boats, you hear a lot of the same concerns from organizers who are working with United Farm Workers and the migrant farm workers who are working at in farms in southern and central California, in Arizona, along the border, right? A lot of them will cross the border without the appropriate visa paperwork. They’re taken advantage of by the farms that hire them.
Oftentimes, the government’s not going to step in, in a way that’s useful, a lot of times, because the individuals who could investigate these claims, the agencies are underfunded, deliberately or otherwise, there’s just not enough people to go around to show up at these places to investigate these issues. I imagine that a lot of this is the same, because you’re in the middle of the ocean, and even if you get claims about workplace conditions and being abysmal, or abuses happening on these boats, it’s likely pretty freaking difficult for these governments to step in in international waters. You have all of these complications. So the point I’m trying to make is what it comes down to is the workers themselves. They are the ones who are collectively able to address, call out these issues, address these issues, force consequences for these issues. And that is no small feat when you’re talking about fleets of boats in the middle of the ocean.
