Aquino urged to look into fishery workers’ plight

LUCENA CITY—In the fishing village of Dalahican here, workers in commercial fishing boats say their wages depend on the boat owner.

“We don’t get a regular pay. If the catch is good, sometimes we receive extra pay. But most often, it is not enough to feed our families,” said one worker who requested anonymity for fear of reprisal from his employer.

These workers are only some of the 600,000 fish workers in the country who work in commercial fishing vessels and aquaculture farms that a national fishers’ group claim do not receive the minimum wage prescribed by law, according to Fernando Hicap, head of fisherfolk alliance Pambansang Lakas ng Kilusang Mamamalakaya ng Pilipinas (Pamalakaya), citing their 2011 study.

Hicap said their study on Filipino fish workers was submitted by his group during an international conference in Bangkok, Thailand, last January and to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (UN-FAO) during a Philippine consultation on UN-FAO Voluntary Guidelines for Small-Scale Fisheries held in Manila on January 27-31.

He urged President Aquino to look into the plight of these fishery workers as the nation celebrates Labor Day.

“Fish lords in commercial and fish culture businesses, and not the regional wage boards (RWBs), determine the daily wage of fish workers in these subsectors of local fisheries,” he said in a statement sent to Inquirer.

He claimed that workers in the fishing industry receive only P100 to P250 per day doing more than eight hours of work daily.

Workers in commercial fishing vessels work an average of 18 hours a day and some even extend fishing up to 20 hours without pay nor additional compensation, he added.

“This is a public knowledge and an open book and not a long-running teledrama of exploitation. It is high time the Aquino administration made a dramatic move to stop this national offshore and inshore exploitation of fish workers by foreign and domestic capital in fisheries,” he said.

But another worker said some boat owners pay their monthly PhilHealth and Social Security System contributions. “Although the pay rate is below the minimum wage, our employer sometimes provides us with loans in case of emergencies,” the fisherman told the Inquirer.

Hicap said as far as fish workers in commercial and aquaculture sectors were concerned, the RWBs did not exist.

“These wage boards don’t really mean a thing to them since wage boards do not recognize fish workers as part of the wage-earning population. They regard fish workers as seasonal workers begging for alms from their employers,” Hicap said.

“We challenge DoLE [Department of Labor and Employment] to investigate this perennial exploitation by foreign and domestic capital,” Hicap said.

“The country’s labor department just takes this issue for granted,” Hicap lamented.