No end in sight: Filipino fishermen still wait on abandonment case

Accounting for overseas labor

The Philippines economy relies heavily on wages sent back from overseas labor. Personal remittances brought an all-time high of $36.1 billion to the country in 2022, according to the Central Bank of the Philippines. An estimated two million Filipinos work abroad;  the most common professions include seafarers, housekeepers, manufacturers and nurses.

“It’s really like a culture for Filipinos – like every Filipino family knows at least one migrant worker,” said Andreanna Garcia, a program officer for the Philippines office of the Solidarity Center, an advocacy organization that partners with local labor unions to protect workers’ rights.

Garcia said the country formed the Department of Migrant Workers in 2022 after labor investigation requests started to overburden other agencies. The Philippines Overseas Employment Administration, which helped authorize Pescadores International, is also transitioning under the jurisdiction of the DMW.

The DMW has started with a limited budget, Garcia said, but she remains hopeful.

“I gotta admire the people in the Department of Migrant Workers, they’re very hands-on … and the leadership under their department secretary – he’s from labor, the unions are very close to him,” she said. “They really admire him because they see that he’s really functioning and really, like, stepping up to the role of helping the Department [of] Migrant Workers.”

Garcia noted that legislators already enacted The Seafarers Protection Act in 2015, and are looking to pass the Magna Carta of Filipino Seafarers this year. The latter awaits President Bongbong Marcos’ pen as its author works on transferring jurisdiction of disputes to the ILO.

The Magna Carta proposes that seafarers work no more than eight hours a day, offers annual paid leave and, most important, sets guidelines for repatriation. Foreign employers (such as McAdam’s Fish) would be required to bear all repatriation costs “from the moment the seafarers leave the ship until they reach the repatriation destination.” 

The bill also codifies emergency repatriation from foreign vessels in the case of war, epidemics, abandonment of ships by shipowners and natural disasters: “The POEA shall require manning agencies to effect the repatriation of seafarers within forty-eight (48) hours or suffer the penalty of suspension.”

Chris Williams, a fisheries expert and marine socioeconomic specialist for the ITF, said the Philippines has forged ahead of other countries, but at the same time, “They’re sending so many people abroad every year, they can’t possibly be doing their due diligence in every single instance.”

Williams said one of the most substantial actions a country can take is ratifying the ILO’s Work in Fishing Convention, which neither the United States nor the Philippines has done.

“One of the first countries to ratify the Work in Fishing Convention was Argentina, where all of their main industrial export fisheries are covered by collective bargaining agreements from unions that are affiliated to the ITF,” he said. “And if you read those collective bargaining agreements, I mean – the first time I read one of the Argentinian ones, I was actually crying with laughter because I couldn’t believe how good their conditions of work were.”

Mangaliman, the Seattle community organizer, said the United 6 also raised their allegations with the Philippine Consulate. With help from local and international supporters, they said, the crew hopes investigators will validate their concerns and push the industry to do better. 

“There’s more to it than just the lost wages and the benefits, but also their experience of being abandoned or even trafficked,” Mangaliman said. “We want to make sure that we continue to raise that as well as organize other exploited fishermen.”

Reporter Lizz Giordano contributed to this story.