On a ship that caught tuna for American consumers, fishermen said they were fed so little that they resorted to eating the bait. On another, a worker said he was beaten repeatedly by the captain, sometimes with a metal hook. On a third, a man who experienced severe burns in a kitchen accident said he was denied medical care and survived only by treating himself with Vaseline.
All three boats offloaded their catch to other vessels, remaining at sea for months. For those who wanted to leave, there was little hope.
These accusations are central to a new lawsuit filed by four Indonesian fishermen. They say they want to right a wrong that, according to them, was tolerated by one of America’s oldest tuna brands, Bumble Bee Foods.
They are suing the company in federal court in California, accusing it of being aware of and benefiting from forced labor on ships operated by its suppliers. Bumble Bee, which is based in San Diego, said it would not comment on pending litigation.
“I want justice,” Muhammad Syafi’i, one of the plaintiffs, said in a Zoom interview from his home in the Indonesian city of Yogyakarta. “For myself, for my fate. And for my friends who are still out there.”
In 2021, he was employed as a cook on a boat that caught tuna that was sold to Bumble Bee (but also had to help with the fishing). He was forced to fork over nearly half of his $320 monthly salary for months. That July, he was severely burned when hot oil from his wok spilled onto the lower half of his body. He said the captain refused to get him medical care for months. Eventually, he was allowed to return home.
Rights groups say the growing global demand for tuna — an industry worth over $40 billion — is abetting human rights abuses. Much of that demand comes from the United States, the world’s largest seafood importer in terms of money. About 80 percent of the seafood eaten in America is imported.
The International Labor Organization, a United Nations agency, estimated in 2021 that there were roughly 128,000 people trapped in forced labor in the global fishing industry. The figure, it said, was most likely higher.
In 2022, the environmental group Greenpeace said that it had been able to track fish caught by a ship that U.S. authorities had flagged as using forced labor, using codes on a Bumble Bee can sold in a grocery store in Arlington, Va. That raised the possibility of more tainted products being on U.S. supermarket shelves.
Bumble Bee, which has been owned by the Taiwanese tuna trading company FCF since 2020, did not respond to those accusations. The next year, the company agreed to remove some claims about its fishing practices from its marketing materials, after it was accused by the Global Labor Justice-International Labor Rights Forum of falsely claiming that its supply chain was fair and safe.
In a report last December, Greenpeace said it had found 10 Indonesian fishermen, who said they were lured by promises of good jobs but later were subjected to violence and hunger every day on the seas. When their ordeal was over, the men said that they often ended up with little or no money.
The accounts from Greenpeace helped form the basis of the lawsuit, which was filed on Wednesday in a U.S. District Court in San Diego. The plaintiffs sued under a law that authorizes survivors of human trafficking, regardless of their citizenship, to sue companies that knew or should have known that they were benefiting from forced labor.
The lawsuit, filed by Mr. Syafi’i and three others, Akhmad, Angga — both of whom go by one name — and Muhammad Sahrudin, seeks unspecified monetary damages from Bumble Bee.
Many of the workers onboard such tuna ships are often poor Indonesians, who are lured by brokers with the promise of high pay. Enforcement of labor laws is often weak in Indonesia, especially in informal sectors like fishing. Rights groups say there is also a lack of official oversight, making it easy for companies to exploit workers.
Mr. Syafi’i said he was still shaken about his experience on a Chinese-flagged vessel called Lu Rong Yuan Yu 211. He returned to Indonesia in July 2022 and had the first of many surgeries. He says he still cannot lift heavy objects, and his genitals, which were severely burned, have not fully healed. He was given about $6,000 in compensation by the broker who found him the job.
He is now unemployed. “I no longer have the desire to work on a ship, ever again, even if they offer me a huge amount of money,” he said. He says he wants to share his experience with other fishermen before they head out to sea.
Before he took that job, he said a friend had told him, “that life on a boat is work, eat, sleep. Repeat. But in reality, no one dared to be truly open about the real conditions.”
