In 2012, the Central Institute of Fisheries Technology noted that women played a minimal role in actual fishing and were mostly engaged in lower paid, more menial, related activities including making and mending nets. Women also form the dominant workforce in preprocessing more than 90 percent in prawn preprocessing centres and 70 percent in other fishery pre-processing centres. Women engaged in pre-processing centres are disproportionately from economically backward classes. 90 percent of women engaged in seafood processing are confined to floor level work. Very few attain supervisory and technical roles. They are hired as casual, unskilled labour and do not receive job security and social security benefits. Internal migrants from Kerala and Tamil Nadu make up a significant portion of workers in fish processing plants in Gujarat. However, in recent years, an increasing number of migrants from North and Northeast India are also migrating for employment in the seafood processing sector in Gujarat. The practice of employing casual workers in pre-processing allows availability of raw seafood materials to entirely dictate working conditions, including hours and the number of workers engaged at any particular time. In India, presence of a readily available workforce to process seafood upon its arrival is, in many cases, maintained by housing migrant workers on site at pre-processing and processing units. Due to lack of regulation at the pre-processing level, as in Bangladesh, workers at the base of India’s seafood value chain remain outside the ambit of national and international regulations, leaving them particularly vulnerable to abuses at work. The full report is available at: http://www.ituc-csi.org/IMG/pdf/precarious_work_in_the_asian_seafood_global_value_chain.pdf