Collection
Work in Industrial Fishing: Why so marginalized, and who can do what to improve working conditions?
Until recently, hired workers in fisheries were relatively invisible in academic research and fisheries policy, with most scholarly attention directed to questions of fisheries management, sustainability, and justice for small scale fishers. This lack of attention means that we know relatively little about work and workers in fishing--who they are; where they come from; why and how they enter fish work; and how they experience their working conditions. Over the past decade this has been changing. Environmental NGOs have been incorporating working conditions into their definitions of sustainability at a global scale, while academic researchers are now exploring the questions posed above through in-depth empirical research. This collection assembles some of this research to consider why work in fishing has been so marginalized compared to work in other maritime sectors and to work on land; to explore how and why workers are recruited to work in fisheries and how they experience working conditions; and to identify some of the issues that need to be considered in policies and strategies that aim to improve working conditions in fishing.
Editors
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Melissa Marschke
Professor at the School of International Development and Global Studies at the University of Ottawa. Her training is in human-environment relations, with an emphasis on livelihoods, social-ecological complexity, and resource governance. She is currently involved in research projects examining (a) precarious work across the seafood sector, and (b) sand livelihoods; e-mail: mmarschk@uottawa.ca
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Peter Vandergeest
Emeritus Professor in Geography at York University. He has been conducting research on forestry, agriculture and fisheries in Southeast Asia since the 1980s, with a focus on rural livelihoods and the situation of the most marginalized resource users. His current research concerns working conditions among migrant workers in industrial fisheries. The focus is on fisheries operated from Taiwan and Thailand, and on migrant workers who travel from Southeast Asia to work in fisheries around the world; e-mail: pvander@yorku.ca
