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After 15 years, migrant fishers still waiting for the government to regulate recruitment
Poor regulatory oversight of the labor recruitment industry in Indonesia makes it easier for fishing vessels, via local manning agents, to recruit migrant fishers that they can exploit.
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t looks very likely that the Indonesian government will fail yet again to issue a much-awaited law to regulate the recruitment and contracting of migrant fishers at home for employment on fishing vessels around the world.
Poor regulatory oversight of the labor recruitment industry in Indonesia makes it easier for fishing vessels, via local manning agents, to recruit migrant fishers that they can exploit. In 2020 there is growing evidence that the hyper-exploitation of migrant fishers in Asia has become considerably worse.
In May 2020, the Indonesian government promised to issue a long-awaited single system for regulating the recruitment and contracting of migrant fishers within its territory. A stated purpose is to make recruitment more orderly and so improve the welfare of the migrant fishers. The idea was to announce the new system this November, but that deadline has passed missing the opportunity to join in the celebrations for World Fisheries Day.
Now the Indonesian government is distracted by the significant resistance from a broad spectrum of civil society, foreign investors, and international organizations concerned about the recently-passed Job Creation Law. The Law claims to be an attempt to create employment but is said to also reduce protections for workers and the environment. The furor has emboldened the Ministry of Transport to step back from the May-compromise, in which it agreed to transfer control of recruitment and contracting to the Manpower Ministry as the legislature first required in 2004 and then again in 2017. The compromise promised to end a confusing period of service duplication, which effectively means manning agents can do as they please.
The new regulation is needed to bring order to a recruitment industry that is left to profit at the expense of some of Indonesia’s most vulnerable people. The government is much closer to issuing a regulation in 2020 than it was in 2004. But that is little solace for the many Indonesian boys and men who have been trafficked for forced labor over the years.
The regulation is urgently needed, but establishing a recruitment system should not be seen as the final step if the aim is to improve the recruitment and working environment of migrant fishers. This kind of regulation is a feature of international migration regimes in Asia, and the stated aim is frequently to reduce labor abuse.
But such government measures to protect migrant workers are known to have the reverse effect by creating forced labor situations. In large part, this is because of how labor migration is financed. Migrating through formal, regulated channels can and do leave migrant workers bearing large debts, leading many into debt bondage situations - the very kind that the systems are built to prevent.
Typically, the Indonesian government sets maximum fees that recruitment agents can charge for their services, which include organizing migration documents, following government processes and of course job-matching. It is known as a cost structure that details how much agents can charge for the training and board that they provide for migrant workers.
For migrant domestic workers, agents would often charge full fees, but then provide substandard services so they could reap more profits. For migrant fishers, there is no such cost structure yet.
But when making one, policymakers would not need to learn from the same experiences. We know they have already grappled with policy questions that balance the welfare interests of migrant workers against their agents’ profit-seeking behavior.
However, it is naïve to think that the fees migrants pay to agents are the only debt they carry. In fact, migrant accumulate a significant debt before they even start the formal recruitment process.
Typically, intending migrant fishers can pay up to Rp 10 million (or possibly more). Much is known about how they finance that debt, either by pawning possessions, borrowing from cash-poor family and friends or taking out high-interest loans, which they guarantee with their land.
But less is known about what that money is used for. Some is used to pay informal brokers (sponsor) for access to the process. But the money is largely used to pay for organizing government-required documents, including a passport and other supporting papers, as well as profit for the manning agents. These costs need to be factored in so that we can say just how free these migrants are to say no to, resist, or leave exploitative and/or abusive work arrangements.
The clear link between recruitment and forced labor is not unique to Indonesia. It can also be found in other low-cost labor-supply countries like the Philippines, where the government has quite sophisticated regulations in place for migrant seafarers. Fishers remain outside the Philippine framework, which the Indonesian regulation promises to address by extending the protections to both groups of migrants.
Advocates can only hope that the regulation is issued sooner rather than later. But when they do, if regulators do not recognize how much the recruitment process is responsible for the exploitation of Indonesian migrant fishers, they will miss a rare opportunity to do more to prevent it.
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Wayne Palmer is a research fellow on formal and informal regulation of labor disputes in Southeast Asia. Christina Stringer specializes in research on migrant worker exploitation and modern slavery. Sallie Yea has research focusing on migrant worker precarity and human trafficking.
