This fisher is a 20-30 year-old man, and a non-EU national typically from Africa or Southeast Asia. He is employed on a contractual basis to work as crew on EU vessels. The vessels he works on may be modern and well-equipped large-scale trawlers owned by large corporate interests with shareholders in different EU countries fishing in EU waters or in northern waters in Greenland, Norway and Iceland. Or they may be small under 12 m vessels operating in the Mediterranean requiring just 2-3 crew. In the latter case the fisher may be a migrant from a third country who has ended up working on a small-scale vessel in the Mediterranean during his journey north from Africa in search of a better life.
He’s not a stranger to fishing as his country is a nation of seafarers, and he was brought up in a coastal community himself. He has opted to work as a crew after seeing some of his friends do this. The money looked good, even if it meant (for the fisher on larger vessels) many weeks at sea, sometimes months, without seeing the family back home. His priority is wages, not whether his vessel complies with fishing regulations.
He had to learn ‘on the job’ and admits that working conditions are hard: he was unprepared for the shifts, the unfamiliar environment, the physical exhaustion, and the mental strain, but has now grown used to it and copes with the risks of injury. Moving from boat to boat, getting to know new crews, and handling new equipment each time can also be taxing.
He has been away from his family for much longer than he wanted, and immigration rules also mean he can’t spend much rest time onshore if he hasn’t got the right paperwork. The camaraderie he has developed with other non-EU crew members makes up for the isolation and a sense he has thatEU crew are oftentreated better. The work is hard for them too, but he knows that their salaries are higher than his.
Language is a barrier, whether he works on large or small vessels, and he’s not part of an employee or crew association to help him claim his rights. He has heard of abuses happening on non-EU vessels and even of reports of slavery in the news, so he considers himself lucky to be on an EU vessel. Even if the salary is very modest, it is stable and allows him to send money home regularly, or in the case of the migrant in the Mediterranean to save it to help with his planned journey north. But he has a nagging feeling that his wages are unfair, and he can sense some dissatisfaction rising among his peers about this. In the hierarchy he is only a worker, not a fisher, and he recognises that this has a big impact on how he sees and cares for his job, the fish, and the marine environment.
He can imagine that his situation could be different if he was a boat owner, but even so, he hasn’t got the necessary knowledge and connections, and deep down he’s not interested in saving to buy his own boat, change his status, and even less in pursuing a career in fishing. He knows he will leave and move on to another vessel or another place when his current work finishes, and that one day he might just leave the industry all together and not look back.