Abstract
The notion of a labour control regime provides a conceptual framework for understanding the web of actors, institutions and norms that shape disciplinary mechanisms in the labour process. While labour regime approaches have drawn in multiple scales and diverse processes, this paper argues that international migration, and social reproduction in migrant source areas, must also be understood as part of the regime. Focusing on the case of Filipino migrants in the UK fishing industry, we use qualitative interviews conducted in the port of Fraserburgh, Scotland, and a migrant sending community in the province of Cebu, Philippines. We argue that the reproductive processes of workers’ lives in their home communities are an important underpinning of the labour regime they participate in when working on contracts overseas. We identify three sets of reproductive processes in particular: the trajectories of household poverty and debt that propel labour migration; the socialisation and social networks, as well as zones of recuperation, provided by home communities; and, the long-term temporalities of previous investments in fishery migration, as well as future aspirations for financial stability and intergenerational social mobility. While reproductive spaces and processes are not controlling mechanisms in themselves, they do represent an important part of the labour regime and they begin to explain migrant fishers’ forbearance in the face of a disciplinary labour regime.
Introduction
The existence of harsh working conditions and forced labour on distant water fishing fleets around the world is widely known (Stringer et al, 2016; Urbina, 2019; Vandergeest and Marschke, 2020; 2021; Yea et al, 2023). Reports of ‘slavery at sea’ have mobilised activists and policymakers in Asia and elsewhere for more than a decade, and recent research in the UK has drawn attention to the conditions of migrant labour in its fishing industry (EJF, 2014; ITF, 2022; Sparks, 2022).
Existing analyses tend (appropriately) to highlight the role of recruitment agencies and vessel owners/skippers, as well as the lax oversight of working conditions by governments, or the existence of migration regimes that are conducive to labour exploitation. Recruitment agencies find and channel migrants into work on vessels around the world and extract significant profit from workers in the process. While some workers are moved outside of formal mechanisms for international work (and may be trafficked), many recruiters are simply using legitimate visa schemes that leave migrant workers vulnerable in various ways. Once on board a fishing vessel, circumstances are almost uniquely conducive to abuse (EJF, 2014; Asis, 2019; Greenpeace and SBMI, 2019; Greenpeace and SBMI, 2021). Vessels usually carry a small crew in distant waters largely outside of territorial control or regulation. The working day is shaped by the ecology of the resources being extracted from the ocean rather than any notion of a defined work shift. The work is inherently dangerous given both the oceanic environment and the equipment being used. Workers and their bosses live and work in close proximity, and in an all-male environment where the authority of the skipper is almost absolute. The motivation to exploit workers is intense due to competition in global seafood supply chains and declining profitability because of resource depletion. Together, these features of labour in the fishery sector create a potent mix that is primed for poor working conditions (Marschke and Vandergeest, 2016; Campling and Colás, 2021; Yea and Stringer, 2023).
While recruitment channels, migration regulation, and the socio-spatial configuration of workplaces are important factors in the labour control regime that exists in fisheries, all of these approaches maintain a focus on the deployment process and the site of production itself. Missing from that picture is a ‘whole worker’ (Burawoy, 1985; Peck, 2022) perspective that brings into view the communities where migrant crew members are coming from, the family circumstances that shape their motivation to undertake difficult work abroad, and the temporalities that shape their past and future engagement with fishing work. This paper seeks to add that dimension by drawing on qualitative research conducted in a UK port and in a migrant sending community in the Philippines.
We will argue that the concept of a labour regime in fishing can expand our view of how worker discipline is effected, beyond the unfreedom that migration schemes and workplaces produce, to include the households, family circumstances and communities that migrant fishers are coming from and remain connected with. While reproductive spaces and relationships are not, in themselves, a source of constrained freedom in the labour market or labour process, they do provide a significant part of an explanation for why workers continue to subject themselves to exploitative, harsh and lonely work far away from home. In fact, the reproductive spaces of workers’ other lives back home are essential in developing a complete understanding of what allows a specific labour regime to exist. That other life – including family livelihood trajectories, a community-based habitus that shapes attitudes towards work, and a future-oriented set of aspirations – shapes workers’ positioning of themselves within a disciplinary labour regime. Thus, while reproductive spaces are not disciplining mechanisms in themselves, they create a set of circumstances and spaces that facilitate workers’ acquiescence to being disciplined, and a motivation towards exercising self-discipline.
Labour regimes, migration and social reproduction
A key task for scholars concerned with advancing the rights and wellbeing of workers in the contemporary global economy has been to understand how global production has incorporated and disciplined labour. Given that capital arranges supply chains and production in spatially complex ways, and workforces are assembled from near and far, a simple focus on in situ processes of production in workplaces is insufficient. A more expansive understanding of what shapes labour’s relationship to capital is needed – one that incorporates the role of various spaces, scales, institutions, and social relations. The notion of a labour regime has been used to assemble this more contextualised approach to the recruitment, training, disciplining and control of labour (Baglioni and Mezzadri, 2020). Baglioni et al describe the labour regime approach as one that: ‘introduces the variegated scales of political-economic and socio-cultural relations, processes and contexts that produce and reproduce networks of workers dispersed across spaces and places from the local to the global’ (Baglioni et al, 2022: 3).
Conceptually, Michael Burawoy’s work on the ‘politics of production’ is an important foundation for a labour regimes approach, as it offered an understanding of labour control that moves beyond the work site or point of production (Burawoy, 1985; Peck, 2022). Burawoy showed that labour discipline was shaped in a wider social and political context. He argued that a ‘factory regime’ is framed by circumstances of market competition in a given sector, relations of social reproduction in society at large, and the intervention of the state around questions of wages, welfare, and collective organising (Baglioni et al, 2022). Using examples from diverse settings Burawoy was able to identify a range of distinct factory regimes including the ‘market despotism’ of the capitalist factory described by Marx, the ‘bureaucratic despotism’ of Eastern Europe in the 1970s, and the ‘hegemonic despotism’ of contemporary regimes under global capitalism.
While Burawoy treated labour regimes as national phenomena manifested locally at sites of production, subsequent work on labour regimes has noted their multi-scalar constitution. One strand of work has directed attention to local regimes of labour control in all of their distinctiveness and variegation (Jonas, 1996; Peck, 1996; Kelly, 2001; 2002). In this way, intricate local forms of regulation, culture, gender relations, global connections, labour organising, and economic history are integrated to construct a nuanced understanding of a labour regime. In the case of export manufacturing in the Philippines, for example, Kelly (2001) shows how localised labour control regimes represent ‘a process that is constituted in the relationships at multiple scales between various dimensions of local capital, the local state, family units, and individual workers’ (Kelly, 2001: 2). Furthermore, beyond national or local scales, as global production networks become ever more complex, there is increasing attention to how a labour regime is linked to spatial configurations of power between key actors in the network (Bair, 2009; Barrientos, 2019).
Feminist political economy has been key to the development of the labour regimes approach, by bringing an understanding of patriarchy as a power structure that exists in part outside the wage labour relation under global capitalism and yet deeply implicated within it (Bair, 2022). As waged workforces became increasingly feminised in the late 20th century, it was clear that gender relations are a key part of any labour control regime. By highlighting the constructions of femininity and masculinity that shaped labour markets and workplaces, this scholarship also demonstrated the need to think about the role of representational or discursive processes in understanding the functioning of a labour regime (Lee, 1998). In conceptualising a ‘sweatshop regime’ in the Indian garment manufacturing sector, for example, Mezzadri notes that the regime encompasses ‘… broader networks of oppression that exceed (or pre-exist) the constitution of “labour” and “labouring” in the sweatshop, and that strongly shape them at the same time’ (Mezzadri, 2016: 3).
Beyond gendered identities, feminist scholarship has also drawn attention to household relations and processes of social reproduction as central to the creation, socialisation, training and disciplining of a workforce (Federici, 2012; Andrijasevic, 2022). Indeed, feminist scholars have argued that labour relations in production processes, and reproductive relations that usually lie outside the workplace, are ‘co-constitutive’ (Baglioni and Mezzadri, 2020). Baglioni et al (2022), for example, show how female workers in Senegalese export horticulture are rendered as disciplined and cheap precisely because the labour regime in the fruit and vegetable packaging industry is predicated on feminised roles as carers and marital relations of polygyny in rural households.
One increasingly important aspect of labour regimes concerns how migrant labour is integrated into production processes. Just as the concept of a labour regime deepens our understanding of how labour is sourced, regulated and disciplined, we can also employ the idea of a migration regime to include: the various factors that shape a worker’s mobility, especially across national borders; the system of truncated rights that migrants endure when living and working abroad; and, the ways in which migrant workers are marginalised and othered in societies where they do not ‘belong’. While migrant workers are still a small proportion of the entire global workforce (although estimated by the International Labour Organization to be around 169 million in 2019), there are sectors and places where they play a significant and even crucial role (Ye, 2016; Campbell, 2018; Taylor and Rioux, 2018). The precarity of migrants’ rights and cultural othering can, in some circumstances, be the defining feature of a labour regime. As Strauss and McGrath note, ‘unfree labour relations and migration regimes are often interrelated in the context of how workforces are “assembled” by capital and the state’ (Strauss and McGrath, 2017: 202). Schling’s (2022) work, for example, on the dormitory regime in the Czech electronics sector shows how migrant workers are racialised and constructed as temporary and disposable. The containment of such workers in dormitories renders them a disciplined ‘just-in-time’ workforce – an aspect of the labour regime that is replicated in many other contexts.
In the case that we develop in this paper, the terms of employment, compensation, rights, legal status, and mobility faced by fishing crews on account of their migrant status are fundamental to understanding how the labour regime operates in that sector. We also suggest that the migrant status of crew members provides a distinct set of spatialities to the connection between social reproduction and the labour regime. We will thus explore: the responsibilities of migrant workers in wider transnational networks of family dependents; how migrant-sending areas provide training and socialisation for workers who are deployed overseas; the role of sending areas as zones of recuperation in between contracts; and, the goals and aspirations for intergenerational reproduction that shape engagement with migrant labour contracts. Our goal in this paper, then, is to pursue a case in which migration regimes and social reproduction are fully integrated into the labour regime and add to our understanding of how labour control works. While past studies have focused almost exclusively on female-dominated employment and the ways in which gender relations and social reproduction are implicated in labour regimes, in this case we examine the case of Filipino migrants working as crew members on fishing vessels in the UK, thus focusing on an almost exclusively male context of employment. We will suggest that here too the labour control regime extends well beyond sites and processes of production, to include the distinctively precarious status of migrant workers, and the underpinning role of transnational social reproduction processes that link such workers to their families, homes and communities.
UK fishing, foreign crews
The UK fishing industry has seen a long-term decline, but has been kept afloat, in part, by the employment of foreign crew members (Howard, 2017). Direct employment in fishing activities across all UK ports had declined from 9,066 in 2011 to 6,955 in 2021 (Seafish, 2022). Over the same time period, the real value of the sector’s production declined, but only slightly: from £1,055 million in 2011 to £953 million in 2021. Analysis has shown that the share of value created in the UK fishing industry that is paid to labour has also declined (Carpenter et al, 2020). This is attributable, in part, to the increased use of migrant labour from outside the European Union, and especially from the Philippines and Ghana. By 2021, a survey of the UK fishing fleet found that 35% of the workforce was from outside the UK, with the Philippines (providing 12% of the entire workforce) being the largest single source country (Seafish, 2021). Such workers from outside of Europe are generally paid a monthly wage, which is considerably less than the catch share paid to local workers. Our own data, discussed later, suggests that in recent years the monthly wage for migrant workers is often less than one half of the monetised catch share paid to local employees (see also Jones et al, 2020).
Most foreign workers in the sector work on a ‘transit visa’. This programme, first introduced under the Immigration Act of 1971, was designed to allow crew members to enter the country without a work permit if their vessel was then leaving UK territorial waters. Originally intended for the wider maritime industry (such as cargo vessels or cruise ships), in the mid-2000s the scheme became increasingly used in the fishing industry, based on the premise that fishing in waters outside the 12-nautical-mile limit of territorial waters constituted ‘leaving the UK’ (Jones et al, 2020). Given that such fishing trips usually involved returning to a UK port after a few days, this was always a dubious characterisation, but was generally tolerated by border authorities as long as crew members lived on their vessels even while they were in port. The result, however, has been a labour regime in which foreign crew members are tied very closely to their vessel and have little freedom to move around. A trip to local shops would be permissible, but going further afield or staying overnight on land would constitute a potential breach of the terms of their visa. With these conditions, and the general legal precarity of crew members’ visa status, came a heavy dependence on (and thus vulnerability to) the skipper that employs them.
Labour and migrant rights advocates have campaigned against the vulnerabilities created by the transit visa scheme (Sparks, 2022). Given the terms of the visa, workers are not treated as immigrants or migrant workers who have entered the UK, nor are they covered by UK employment law. The International Transport Workers Federation (ITF) has characterised the transit visa as a ‘one-way ticket to labour exploitation’ (ITF, 2022). Employers too have been dissatisfied with the limitations placed on where they can fish and the uncertainty associated with the discretionary powers of border officials. The system also has some geographical oddities because of the configuration of non-territorial waters around the UK. For example, the 12-mile threshold is reached much sooner on the eastern side of Scotland than on the west, where an archipelago of islands means that the richest waters for prawn trawlers are counted as territorial waters and therefore ineligible for crew working under a transit visa (Stevenson, 2018). The result is a higher dependence on migrant crew on the east coast of Scotland.
An alternative pathway to work in the UK exists through a Skilled Worker programme, but the categorisation of deckhands as ‘unskilled’ and the English language requirements of the programme, as well as additional costs, make this a difficult pathway for international recruitment.
In April 2023 the UK government announced a ‘zero tolerance’ policy on transit visas with immediate effect (Harper, 2023). This meant that the previous approach in which vessels had to operate for a majority of their time at sea outside UK waters, is now abandoned and they must exclusively operate outside the 12-mile limit. Without a transition period, this has created significant disruption in the sector.
Migrant fishers are also vulnerable because they lack a collective voice (Carpenter et al, 2020). There are no labour unions specifically focused on fishing crew in the UK, regardless of the workers’ nationality, and so most grievances have to be taken to the employers or employment agencies (in the UK or abroad) that are involved in a worker’s deployment (Carpenter et al, 2020). Third-sector organisations, such as the Fisherman’s Mission, often provide exceptional care and services for vulnerable migrant fishers, but their mandate is shared across all fishers (including skippers, and therefore the employers, of migrant crew members). The most strenuous advocacy has often been left to unions such as the ITF or academic researchers, whose work has been picked up in media accounts (ITF, 2022; McVeigh, 2022; Sparks, 2022; Cundy, 2023).
For the most part, however, working conditions on UK fishing vessels have not been comparable with the most egregious cases of dangerous and exploitative circumstances identified on fishing fleets elsewhere in the world. In fact, for many fishers from the Philippines, a contract on a European vessel – plying waters for relatively short fishing trips of about a week, and earning several times the wage of a vessel out of Taiwan – is considered the pinnacle of migration opportunities (Marschke and Vandergeest, 2023). Nevertheless, labour conditions often fall well short of the UK’s own statutory requirements, and there is little doubt that migrant crew are favoured because they are significantly cheaper, more reliable, and less recalcitrant than local workers. Several studies have highlighted problematic conditions related to healthcare after injuries or sicknesses, excessive hours of work, inhibited freedom of movement, and intimidation or violence (ITF, 2022; Sparks, 2022).
From Cebu to Scotland: sources and destinations
This paper draws on interviews from a specific source area for migrant fishery workers in the Philippines, and a destination port in the UK. In this section we describe both of these contexts and the sources of data used.
The Philippines has a highly-developed infrastructure for the export of workers and so plays a prominent role in many global labour markets (Rodriguez, 2010; Polanco, 2017; Galam, 2022). This infrastructure includes privately-operated training institutions and recruitment agencies, state monitoring and regulation of skills certifications and migrant deployments, and a government role in the marketing of Filipino labour (including specific bilateral agreements to supply labour in areas such as healthcare). Beyond these tangible mechanisms to support and promote the export of human labour, there is also a discursive environment that lauds the heroism of migrant workers (and their remittances). And, in the sphere of culture, there is a widespread acceptance of migration as a desirable, and even expected, means for seeking financial stability (and upward social mobility) for families (Aguilar et al, 2009; Aguilar, 2014). This ‘migration infrastructure’ has generated one of the world’s most significant flows of temporary contract labour. Around 1.8 million Filipino workers are deployed on temporary contracts each year, almost 500,000 of them as seafarers (PSA, 2022).
Our research involved key informant interviews with recruitment agencies (known in the Philippines as ‘manning agencies’ when they specialise in seafarer recruitment), government officials, union organisers, legal advocates for labour rights, and non-governmental organisations involved in migrant and seafarer rights. In total, 15 such interviews were conducted in the Philippines, or via zoom. A second component of the research involved interviewing fishers and their family members. In total, 56 fishers were interviewed, all of them men. They had deployed to many different fleets, including vessels operating out of Japan, Russia, Taiwan, the Netherlands, and the UK. Many had spent time working in local or inter-island fishing in the Philippines and had then moved through several different fleets around the world.
Some of the interviews with fishers were conducted in Manila or at overseas ports via zoom, but we also visited the coastal municipality of Oslob on the island province of Cebu. There we interviewed 11 fishers who were retired or between contracts, and 11 spouses of migrant crew members. Oslob is a small town, which had a population of just under 30,000 in 2020. It has developed a significant tourism industry revolving around whale shark watching, but fishing has deep historical roots and has served as the cornerstone of its communal life for generations (Fernandez, 2017). Local fishing has, however, been in decline due to overfishing and the degradation or destruction of coral reefs. In the 1980s, local fishing grounds were estimated to support over 5,000 fishers, but the number had dwindled to 1,458 in 2003 and 1,012 in 2009 (Green et al, 2004; ILO-IPEC, 2002). This decline has led to increasing dependence on employment further afield, including in international fishing fleets.
The other side of our study was conducted in Fraserburgh, a small but important fishing port on the east coast of Scotland. Although its population in 2020 was only 12,570, Fraserburgh is the UK’s largest fishing port in terms of direct employment, with 690 individuals working on 228 vessels (Seafish, 2022). Various types of vessels operate out of the port, but it is Europe’s largest centre for nephrop trawlers (nephrops are also known as Norwegian lobsters, langoustine or scampi). Trawlers operating out of Fraserburgh have become increasing dependent on non-European crew members. In Scotland as whole, a 2021 survey found that 31% of crew members were from outside the UK, with the largest single source country (at 11.5% of total employment) being the Philippines (with higher percentages for crew members designated as ‘deckhands’ and for nephrop trawlers in particular) (Seafish, 2021). Observation and interviews in Fraserburgh in 2022, however, suggested that the percentage of crew members from the Philippines working on trawlers is significantly higher – perhaps in excess of 50%. One local vessel management agency noted that of the 48 crew members on their vessels, 44 were from the Philippines.
Local youth on the east coast of Scotland are predominantly attracted instead to urban employment, jobs in North Sea oil fields, or far more lucrative fishing work on very large pelagic herring or mackerel trawlers that operate far out in the Atlantic Ocean (in our interviews, the latter vessels were reported to have no foreign crew members at all). The uncertainty, irregular hours and inherent hazards of fishing on smaller trawlers held much less appeal. For those locals that do work on smaller trawlers, compensation is typically in the form of a catch share, which obviously carries an element of risk, but also usually resulted in significantly higher payments: often three times the monthly income of migrant workers for equivalent work. For Filipino workers, all were employed on transit visas, and most earned the equivalent of around US$1400 per month. Employment was usually for eight to nine months, followed by two to three months back home in the Philippines (although the COVID-19 pandemic affected that pattern for several years). In Fraserburgh, we interviewed 20 Filipino crew members working on nephrop trawlers, as well as key informants in the local fishing industry. Several were from Oslob, Cebu, hence the motivation to conduct interviews in that location as a specific source area.
Reproduction and the labour regime for migrant fishers
In this section we draw primarily on our interviews in Fraserburgh and Oslob to develop a picture of how three dimensions of reproductive life shape the fishery labour regime for migrant workers. First, we examine the family histories, and current circumstances of poverty and debt, that drive the process of migration for fishery work. Repeated migration continues, and working conditions are tolerated, because of the network of responsibilities that migrant crew members have in their home communities. Second, we highlight the ways in which a fishing community represents a habitus of learned dispositions towards the rigours and hardships of fishing and migration. In a very direct way, employers of migrant crew members benefit from their socialisation into the distinctive work patterns of fishing. Finally, we look at how migration for fishing work is part of a temporality such that working lives are viewed in the context of a trajectory, past and present, of social mobility. In this sense, a contract is not just a contract: it is both a culmination of past efforts and a means towards a future life that is part of a migrant’s plans or aspirations.
Poverty, debt and livelihood
‘Life has been tough for us, especially when my father left us. I was only 13 years old, and I didn’t know anything about life. My mother took on all the responsibilities, and there were six of us siblings. I still remember that my youngest sibling and I would sometimes skip dinner because there was not enough food. The next day, our mother would skip dinner instead. Food is the most important thing for survival, but we can’t even manage to have it every day. That’s how poor we were before. So, when I became of legal age, I immediately went into interisland fishing to become a fisherman abroad. The family of my spouse also provided support, which was a huge help. I was able to pay off my debts in less than three years. I also helped my two siblings enter fishing. Now, the three of us are providing support for our mother.’ (Fisher #32, 2022, Male, translated from Filipino)
It is impossible to separate this long-term precarity of existence in a migrant sending area from the ways in which a crew member engages with the labour regime in fishing. Acquiescence to the labour regime, despite harsh or exploitative working conditions, is assured by a history of poverty and the need to provide for an extended network of dependents.
‘I would not work on this job if I did not have to. Before, we really needed huge money. Our father’s debt back then was 250,000 pesos (almost US$4,500), but due to the interest and several years of no payment, it became almost half a million (almost US$9,000). My brother and I worked together on that. Our father also had a mortgage in which the responsibility was passed on to us. The bank will take it if we don’t continue to pay. We also sent our two brothers to school so they could have a better future. Then there are the daily expenses, and it became even more difficult when I started having my own family. There was almost nothing left of the remittances I sent. All my savings were used to pay debts. I don’t know how we survived that time.’ (Interview, Fisher #30, Oslob, translated from Filipino, 2022)
Even with longstanding family debts, the process of migration is costly, and extended family support and other forms of debt are often required to finance a deployment overseas. The process of applying to work abroad requires investment in training, application fees and various documentary requirements. For some aspects, such as visiting the manning agency and eventually leaving from the international airport, a trip to Manila is required, which means a lengthy ferry voyage or a plane ride and the cost of accommodation in the city. These are significant expenses for recruits from poorer families in distant regions of the country. The funds to support these expenses may be drawn from extended family (including relatives who are already abroad), from the sale or mortgaging of assets such as land, from local moneylenders, or from an advance extended by a recruitment agency. Where the debt is incurred, it creates a lock-in that prevents curtailment of work contracts or workplace behaviour that would risk either dismissal or non-renewal. In this way, debt is disciplining in the distant labour process that migrant crew members undertake.
‘The expenses are really huge. [My son] was able to save some money when he went interisland fishing. Then his friends lent him money, and his debt amounted to 30,000 pesos (US$528). It turns out that there are more requirements now than before. In the past, they only required a few certifications like BT [Basic Training] and STCW [Standards of Training, Certification, and Watchkeeping].… We pawned our TV, cell phone, electric fan, and whatever we could. We pawned them so that he could go interisland fishing. That’s the only way we could help. We couldn’t retrieve the pawned items because we couldn’t pay for them.’ (Interview, OslobFam5, translated from Filipino, 2022)
‘It is sad because it is hard to be away from family. The truth is, it is not just a sacrifice for him, but for me as well. We could have just lived a simple life here and always be together. It is hard to be left behind because I must take care of everything. Every now and then, there are people who come to our house and ask me to pay his debts. Sometimes I cannot give anything because the remittance arrives late. So, the burden falls on me to make sure we have money to pay off the debts and have money to use for everyday. It is quite stressful to think about the money. It is really stressful when there is no money.’ (Interview OslobFam2, spouse of fisher, translated from Filipino, 2022)
‘I manage the money he sends.… The most difficult part is paying off debts because we borrowed from many people. When they found out that James was able to go fishing, they expect us to pay them back. It was embarrassing because I had to beg others who we still can’t afford to pay. It was also stressful because some of them need the money urgently. He sends a lot of money, but it quickly runs out.’ (Interview OslobFam4, translated from Filipino, 2022)
As is clear from these quotes, the labour process of migrant fishers is underpinned by the reproductive work undertaken by others back home – not just in relation to financial management, but all of the work of the household. Thus the labour regime for global fishing is not just shaped by the household circumstances of migrants – it also shapes the unremunerated domestic labour process of those left behind as an integral part of the regime.
Home, community and habitus
Migrants’ perspectives on their working lives are shaped by the socialisation they experience in their homes and communities. In this way, a ‘habitus’ of learned dispositions is created, which workers carry with them to their places of work (Kelly and Lusis, 2006; Rooksby, 2017). In unpacking the implications of this socialisation, several points emerge.
Migrant crew members who have been raised in a fishing community (such as Oslob) have been inculcated with a place-based culture that is attuned to the demands of working at sea and on fishing vessels in particular. One migrant crew member in Scotland, who had also worked on vessels in Saudi Arabia and out of Taiwan noted that, “I was a fisherman already since 12 years old because we live in an island. That’s our source of income. Only fishing. Even my parents, my family, all my cousins. Everybody” (Fisher #23, Fraserburgh, 2022). Similarly, another migrant crew member mentioned, “all of us in the province are mostly fisherman. We know each family has at least one or two fishermen. My son might end up in that work, maybe when he already becomes an adult” (Fisher #27, Oslob, 2022).
Recruiters and employers overseas are able to tap into, and benefit from, this culture of seafaring which is passed down intergenerationally in a place like Oslob. Migrants are already socialised into the hardships and requirements of fishery work. Most obviously this is evident in the seafaring and fishing skills that workers have acquired, but also in relation to their understanding of the labour process involved. This might include issues such as demands to work irregular hours, the inherent risk of the work, the intensification of work processes during periods of active fishing, or the absolute authority of the skipper on board – many of which will fall within the expectations of those who have worked in local fisheries in the Philippines.
‘Of course, our life in the vessel was difficult. Even if my work back then in the Philippines was fishing, it was different abroad. Laziness was not allowed since we would be yelled at. There are some days when we don’t sleep in a day especially when there are many harvests. Then the next day, we will be expected to go straight to work even if we haven’t slept. There were only a few crew on the ship, but when we were in the Philippines, there was shifting. It is inevitable that we will get sick if we are treated like that. Worse, we still go to work even though we’re sick. They will only give us biogesic, but that was not what we needed. We lacked sleep and rest and that was what we were looking for. We have a saying that you will die early if you are a fisherman. Good thing I’m still alive!’ (Interview, Fisher #30, Oslob, translated from Filipino, 2022)
As this fisher (semi-jokingly) points out, the dangers of fishing are well-known to crew members, but a distinction is drawn between what is normal and acceptable in their own community and what they are expected to tolerate overseas.
Another dimension of community life that influences the experiences of migrant workers pertains to the sense of camaraderie among the crew members. The same respondent quoted above noted that: “Most of the crew I worked with were from Cebu. It felt like home from afar. We also didn’t have to talk silently or secretly about our complaints because we could just speak in Bisaya, our native language” (Interview, Fisher #30, Oslob, translated from Filipino, 2022).
‘For example, with Roger [seated alongside him] – because the captain is asking me [about] new crew and then I tell the captain, this mate does not 100% good speak in English, but this guy is good at working 100% because this guy spent a long time working in a fishing vessel also in the Philippines. He knows what he’s doing about the fishing. That’s why I recommend Roger to captain, and then captain say, “No problem”.’ (Interview, Fishers #21/22, Fraserburgh, 2022)
A consequence of such networked recruitment is that the first crew member acquires a debt of gratitude to his captain, and the new recruit incurs a debt of gratitude to his ‘backer’, which means that he is unlikely to embarrass him by being uncooperative or resistant in the workplace – or indeed being anything less than a model crew member.
One other dimension of community life appears important in understanding migrants’ experience of fishery work abroad. As noted earlier, most contracts for workers are for eight to nine months followed by a few months back home between contracts. This cycle of work and relaxation seems to be essential to tolerating the rigours of working on board a vessel. In that sense the home is fundamental in terms of rest, recuperation and reflection on the work undertaken during the contract. It is hard to imagine that the levels of intensive work expected during a period on board would be possible if it weren’t for the two or three months of family time that exists in between contracts. In a sense, then, the emotionally recuperative role of home serves as a kind of subsidy for the exploited and confined lives of that migrant crew face during their deployments.
‘There is no sleep, literally. It makes me wonder if that is even possible. Who would allow their employees to work without sleep, right? But they were serious about it. His colleague from the vessel had even visited here before. They laughed as they remembered that they had a fight back then due to exhaustion.’ (Interview, OslobFam2, Oslob, translated from Filipino, 2022).
In short, then, friends and family provide a source of resilience, recuperation and reproduction between contracts at sea. Here, the reproduction facilitated by the home and community do not act directly as a disciplining mechanism in the labour regime, but they do provide the sustenance to make that regime tolerable. It is through these relationships that fishers find solace, strength, and a sense of belonging, enabling them to endure the demanding conditions they face in their work environment.
Temporalities of the life cycle and reproduction
A focus on the process of recruitment and deployment, or on the labour process at the site of production, tends to approach a particular migration episode in isolation. What this misses is the temporality that surrounds that deployment. There are distinctive temporalities associated with maritime work, and the role of the maritime sector in global capitalism as a whole (Campling and Colás, 2021; Colás and Campling, 2023), but here our attention focuses on the specific embodied temporalities that feature in the lives of migrant fishers themselves.
One such temporality relates to how a worker’s deployment in Scotland fits into their overall lifetime trajectory of reproduction as a fishery worker. In the longer term, a specific deployment to a relatively lucrative contract in Scotland will likely represent the culmination of a long history of investment in training and certification, and deployments to less desirable jobs, for example in Philippine inter-island fishing or in the Taiwanese distant water fleet. The work in Scotland is thus not just a matter of immediacy – it is something that crew members have been working towards, and this represents a further reason to put up with aspects of the labour regime that would be considered unacceptable to local Scottish workers (or to migrant crew if they were working back home in the Philippines).
One fisher we interviewed in Fraserburgh (quoted earlier) had started to work in fishing in the Philippines at the age of 12. In his twenties he had deployed to Saudi Arabia, where he worked as a trawl vessel skipper for nine years. He then took time away from fishing to start a family but subsequently worked on a Taiwanese vessel, enduring a meagre salary for another five years. When he eventually found work in Scotland, his salary was many times higher. Another fisher in Fraserburgh had also worked on a Taiwanese tuna long-liner for four years, initially earning just £160 per month in his early contracts. This compared with his current monthly income of £1,470 in Scotland. Given this trajectory, work contracts in Scotland are seen as the culmination of several steps – and, consequently, not something to risk or surrender with complaints or poor work habits.
Perhaps even more important than the past is the future. Workers engage with the labour process with a view to the future temporalities of their aspirations. Andrijasevic (2022) makes a similar point in analysing the ways in which imagined futures of a ‘good life’ are part of the labour control regime around factory work in Slovakia and Czechia. Many of the fishers and families of fishers we spoke to described their need to take deployments so that they could achieve specific goals in terms of livelihood sustainability and security for their families, or to finance the education of their children through to college graduation.
‘I just want to give my family a good life. My two children will be finishing college soon. One is taking BS in Marine Engineering, and the other is taking BS in Biology. I always tell them to study hard so they won’t end up like me. If they want to work at sea, they should not work on a fishing vessel. They should work on a cargo ship because it is less dangerous, and the pay is better. I still need to work hard for my other two kids. I just want all my children to finish their studies. My next plan is to open a small eatery and buy a tricycle. Maybe we can save enough in three years since my contract is uncertain. Sometimes, I don’t have a job for two years because I’m on standby. Our savings would get depleted during those times. I need to make sure that we can live without relying too much on our salaries – that is why I plan to invest in a business…. I want to retire from fishing already, but there are still many things that need to be saved up for. If I can secure a steady source of income, I will stop. But I still have many plans for my family, so I will just bear with it. It’s hard to improve one’s life without hard work. We have to endure.’ (Interview, Fisher #32, Oslob, translated from Filipino, 2022)
‘We are fine now. All the debts were paid. I also stopped working because, finally, I was able to help my brothers finish university. Now we pass the obligation to them to help our parents. The money I saved from my last contracts was used to invest in a van. The income from van rental is what we use for our daily expenses. The business is good because Cebu City never runs out of visitors. It only got weakened during the pandemic, but fortunately, it is getting back to normal. I am happy now. I would not have been able to achieve them if it was not for fishing.’ (Interview, Fisher #30, Oslob, translated from Filipino, 2022)
‘I retired from working. My body cannot work anymore because I am old. I was able to set aside some money but it ran out fast especially when the pandemic happened. By God’s mercy, my first born finished college and he has been helping us now since then.’ (Interview, Fisher #28, Oslob, translated from Filipino, 2022)
‘I am already good. I have saved money, and sometimes I worked as a tourist guide when there are many tourists. But there are many competitions. My daughter helps us with our daily expenses. She sends 3000 pesos or 4000 pesos per month. We must fit all our expenses into that amount.’ (Interview, Fisher #27, Oslob, translated from Filipino, 2022)
His decision to retire in 2019 after finishing 12 contracts was influenced by his daughter’s commitment to support them, understanding the sacrifices he had made for their better life and her own education. His daughter currently works as a chef in a hotel in Cebu City.
The key point here is that work as a migrant crew member fits into a set of temporalities that includes past trajectories that reproduce the worker into their current role, and future plans for intergenerational mobility and livelihood stability. A migrant’s engagement with the labour process in Scotland is therefore shaped both by their past investments in working towards a lucrative deployment, and by their aspirations for the future. These are contexts that determine their tolerance for the hardships they might face in a specific deployment, and contribute to the possibilities for a disciplinary labour regime in the global fishing industry.
Conclusions
We have suggested in this paper that the notion of a labour regime is important in understanding the multitude of actors and institutions involved in labour control and discipline, but that it needs to be expanded in two directions. Firstly, and especially in a sector like the global fishing industry, the labour regime needs to be analysed in relation to a migration regime that shapes the mobilities, rights and vulnerabilities of workers. Second, we need to pay close attention to the ways in which spaces of social reproduction are factored into migrants’ experiences of the labour contracts. In several ways, we have shown that, for male Filipino fishers working in the UK, transnational spaces of reproduction can be seen as constitutive parts of the labour regime.
Relationships of debt and livelihood precarity in the Philippines are not external to the labour process experienced in Scotland, but are intrinsic structural elements of the regime. The web of dependencies with family members back home shape the decisions and behaviour of migrant fishers in Scotland, and the challenges they are willing to endure. More broadly, home communities are also important because they create a habitus that socialises migrant fishers into the norms and expectations of their work, as well as providing social networks for recruitment. Spaces of reproduction also play an important role as zones of recuperation in between gruelling contracts overseas. Finally, the temporalities of life cycles and reproduction are central to understanding why migrants choose to embark on fishing work and why they persevere in the face of adversity. On the one hand, working on a Scottish vessel is the culmination of a long-term trajectory of migrant labour in the fisheries sector, and much investment along the way. On the other hand, decisions are often driven by future-oriented aspirations, such as securing a family’s future or financing children’s education through to college graduation. These long-term goals provide a profound sense of purpose and motivation, encouraging migrants to endure the daily challenges of their work.
These insights into the ‘whole’ of migrant fishers’ lives add to our understanding of the labour regime that might otherwise revert to an emphasis on the site of production or the governance of migration. The experiences and attitudes of fishers reported here allow us to think about how sites and dynamics of social reproduction are implicated in the labour regime, and especially the disciplining of (male) migrant labour on fishing vessels. This disciplining is not solely imposed from above but is also embedded within the circumstances and spaces that facilitate acquiescence, bind workers to their roles, and encourage self-disciplining.
Funding
Funding was provided by Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, Insight Grant #435-2020-1304, titled Work at Sea: Explaining Labour Relations in the Global Fishing Industry.
Conflict of interest
The authors declare that there is no conflict of interest.
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