A new piece by investigative journalists at the Outlaw Ocean Project (OOP) has warned the Philippines does not do enough to protect the huge numbers of its citizens that head out around the world to work in the fisheries sector.

You can find the full report at the Filipino news site PhilStar.

read also

Sysco, Trident among big firms asked for updates on forced labor sourcing investigations

In the last decade, the Philippines has annually sent abroad some two million workers, approximately 400,000 of whom are employed in work at sea each year. Filipinos are often in high demand internationally because many speak English and tend to be better educated than workers from other Southeast Asian countries, the report noted.

"The Philippine government insists that it does not promote the export of workers, merely helping to manage the process, but experts who study the country reject this claim. Filipinos working overseas have sent more than $160 billion in wages back to the Philippines to be pumped into the national economy in the last five years, fueling the country’s GDP growth."

That return, according to a study for the Migration Policy Institute by Georgetown University’s Global Human Development Program fellow Maruja Asis, has led the Philippine government into complacency, relying on this steady inflow of capital and avoiding needed reforms that would encourage growth in the domestic job market, it said.

In 2022, workers sent back $36.1bn to the Philippines, accounting for nearly 10% of the country’s entire economic output for the year. Sea-based labor alone generated more than $6.5bn remitted to the Philippines that same year.

The Department of Migrant Workers (DMW) -- established in 2022 via a merger of several pre-existing government agencies -- was created to act as the regulator of this secondary economy. "Yet its oversight has come up short, even when there are signs of abuse," said OOP.

"The Philippines’ manning agencies -- the private companies that connect workers to foreign companies looking for sea-based labor -- are governed by law dictating that they are to make sure the companies they place Filipinos with are compliant with labor laws and human rights standards, and it is the legal responsibility of the DMW to enforce these requirements.

"However, reporting by The New York Times has shown that the manning agency system is full of cracks. These gaps have gone overlooked by the DMW, landing migrant workers in physically and economically exploitative situations."