A four-day strike by nearly 2,000 Senegalese and Ivory Coast fishers who work on vessels owned by European companies operating in West African waters pulled back the cover on unfair and exploitative labor practices that plague the industrial fisheries sector.
“The conditions are very tough, and we don’t get paid what we deserve,” Aliou Ngom, 44, who works as a mechanic on Via Alize, a French-flagged tuna purse seiner that operates off West Africa and in the Indian Ocean, told Mongabay. “We don’t work to buy a car or build a house. We work just to eat.”
The seafarers allege they are not paid the International Labor Organization minimum wage of $658 per month, set under the EU-Senegal and EU-Ivory Coast Sustainable Fisheries Partnership Agreements (SFPAs).
Some of the EU-owned vessels that employ the striking workers are flagged to EU nations and subject to the provisions of the SFPA. Others, however, while owned by EU-based companies, fly the flag of a different country and thereby evade labor regulations as well as sustainability provisions in the SFPAs. More than a third of EU-owned vessels operating in the region use such “flags of convenience.”
The strike, which lasted from June 5-8, was backed by the International Transport Workers’ Federation headquartered in London and local unions in Senegal and the Ivory Coast. Fishers who were already on board vessels for the fishing season stopped working, bringing fishing to a halt on those boats. The unions called off the strike after the Senegalese government intervened and started talks with the ship owners.
“We’re demanding that the provisions of the partnership agreements signed between the European Union and our respective countries be applied. … Nothing is being respected,” Yoro Kane, deputy general secretary of the Autonomous Union of Seafarers of Senegal, told Mongabay. Kane said that while African sailors did much of the hard labor on board the vessels, hiring them was less costly for the owners than hiring Europeans for the same jobs.
SFPAs are agreements between the EU and non-EU states. They allow boats flagged to EU states to fish in the other states’ national waters. Many of these deals are with less-industrialized African countries. The EU says the deals benefit both parties. However, critics characterize them as unfair and exploitative.
While the ILO minimum wage does not always apply to fishers, its inclusion in the agreement between the Senegalese government and the European Union makes it “compulsory,” El Hadji Aboubacar Faye, a senior official at Senegal’s Agence Nationale des Affaires Maritimes (ANAM), told Mongabay.
“The wage conditions granted to the seamen shall not be lower than those applied to crews from [the vessels’] respective countries and shall, under no circumstances, be below ILO standards,” reads the EU-Senegal SFPA. A similar provision is included in the EU-Ivory Coast pact.