Forced Labor in Tuna Supply Chains: What the StarKist Investigation Reveals

ECOCIDE

A can of tuna is one of the most ordinary products in an American supermarket. Its supply chain is anything but ordinary. Before tuna reaches a shelf, it may have been caught thousands of miles from land, aboard a vessel operating for weeks or months at sea, by migrant workers recruited in one country, employed through agencies in another, sailing under the jurisdiction of a third and supplying companies whose products are ultimately sold somewhere else entirely.

A new investigation published by Global Labor Justice, working with the migrant fisher union FOSPI-PMFU, argues that those layers can create conditions in which serious labor abuses are extremely difficult for workers to escape and equally difficult for consumers to see. The investigation focuses on the Pacific albacore supply chain of StarKist, one of the largest processed tuna brands in the United States, and draws on interviews with 92 predominantly Indonesian migrant fishers who had worked aboard 37 Taiwan-flagged or Taiwanese-owned vessels supplying the company. Global Labor Justice says indicators of forced labor were identified in every fisher interviewed and on every vessel examined, while researchers concluded that the evidence concerning 62 fishers across 27 vessels was sufficient to meet the forced-labor threshold used in their assessment.

The allegations include recruitment debt, retention of passports, excessive working hours, isolation at sea, poor access to medical care and employment arrangements that workers said made leaving their jobs extremely difficult. The report does not establish that every vessel supplying StarKist uses forced labor, nor does it represent a court judgment against the company. It does, however, raise a much larger question about the modern seafood economy: when the labor behind a product takes place hundreds or thousands of miles offshore, how can companies, regulators and consumers know whether the people catching it are genuinely free?

That question is central to Not For Sale’s wider work on modern-day slavery and global supply chains. Long before the current investigation, Not For Sale examined forced labor in Southeast Asian seafood production in its whitepaper Opportunities to Address the True Cost of Thailand’s Seafood, documenting how recruitment practices, isolation at sea, extreme hours and limited oversight can combine to create conditions in which exploitation becomes difficult to detect and even harder for workers to escape.

What This Article Covers

• What Global Labor Justice and FOSPI-PMFU found in StarKist’s Pacific albacore supply chain.
• Why migrant fishers can be particularly vulnerable to forced labor.
• How recruitment debt, passport retention, employer-linked visas and isolation at sea can restrict workers’ freedom.
• What StarKist says about labor standards in its supply chain and how the seafood industry has responded to the allegations.
• What Taiwan has done to strengthen protections for migrant fishers and where concerns remain.
• Why environmental sustainability and labor sustainability should not be treated as the same thing.
• What worker-led proposals such as enforceable brand agreements could add to existing audits and certification systems.

Key Takeaways

• Global Labor Justice interviewed 92 migrant fishers who had worked aboard 37 vessels linked to StarKist’s Pacific albacore supply chain and says every interview contained at least one forced-labor indicator.
• Researchers assessed the evidence concerning 62 fishers working on 27 vessels as sufficient to meet the forced-labor threshold applied in the investigation.
• Workers reported passport retention, recruitment debt, excessive hours, isolation, inadequate access to medical care and fear of retaliation.
• StarKist did not directly answer the Washington Post’s questions about the findings, instead referring the newspaper to a statement from the National Seafood Association, which said the industry takes worker mistreatment allegations seriously and supports reporting specific concerns to authorities.
• StarKist’s own policies prohibit forced labor and say the company expects seafood suppliers to comply with responsible labor standards.
• Taiwan says it has strengthened protections for migrant crew members through its Fisheries and Human Rights Action Plan and other enforcement measures, while the new allegations suggest significant risks remain.
• FOSPI-PMFU is asking StarKist to negotiate a binding agreement covering communication at sea, fair contracts and wages, health and safety, freedom of association and grievance mechanisms.

Why This Story Matters Now

The StarKist allegations arrive during a period of increasing international attention to labor conditions in global fishing. In February 2026, the International Labour Organization published the largest regional survey yet of migrant workers in the fishing and seafood-processing sectors of South-East Asia. Applying its methodology for measuring forced labor, the study estimated that 13 percent of migrant workers surveyed across fishing and seafood processing were working in forced-labor conditions, rising to approximately 20 percent among migrant fishers themselves. The ILO also found particularly high risks aboard distant-water tuna vessels, where workers can spend long periods offshore, far from ordinary inspection systems, support networks and opportunities to leave their employment.

That wider context is important because the allegations against StarKist-linked vessels should not be understood only as a dispute involving one company. Distant-water fishing has characteristics that can make workers unusually dependent on employers and recruiters. Once a vessel leaves port, there may be no workplace inspector to call, no practical way to walk away from a job and no opportunity to seek help until the vessel returns to land. The ILO has repeatedly identified migrant workers as particularly vulnerable to deception, recruitment debt, withheld wages, document retention, excessive hours, violence and coercion in commercial fishing, especially when vessels remain offshore for extended periods.

The size of the wider tuna economy makes those risks globally significant. The International Labour Organization notes that the Pacific tuna fishery supplies roughly 60 percent of global tuna production in the Western and Central Pacific and supports extensive international supply chains involving migrant fishers from Indonesia, the Philippines and elsewhere in South and Southeast Asia. When labor safeguards fail inside that system, the consequences can travel extraordinarily far from the vessel itself, eventually reaching consumers who may have no indication of who caught the fish inside the package they purchase.

What the StarKist Investigation Found

Global Labor Justice’s report, On the Hook: Forced Labor in StarKist’s Supply Chain, was produced following approximately two and a half years of investigation and research conducted with FOSPI-PMFU, a union representing migrant fishers in Taiwan. Researchers mapped StarKist’s Pacific albacore supply chain using vessel information, documents, Automatic Identification System data and other sources, identifying 313 vessels connected to the supply chain, including 162 that researchers classified as Taiwan-flagged or Taiwanese-owned. Interviews were then conducted with 92 Indonesian migrant fishers who had worked aboard 37 vessels.

The report says at least one International Labour Organization forced-labor indicator appeared in the circumstances described by every fisher interviewed. Researchers further concluded that 62 of the 92 workers, spread across 27 vessels, had experienced conditions sufficient to satisfy the forced-labor threshold used in the investigation. It is important to distinguish those two findings. The existence of an indicator does not automatically establish forced labor, because indicators are warning signs used to help investigators identify patterns of coercion. The report’s stronger conclusion applies to the group of workers for whom researchers assessed the combined evidence as meeting the relevant threshold.

Among the recurring allegations were passport retention and employment arrangements that tied workers closely to a specific employer. All 92 fishers interviewed said their passports had been held while they were at sea, according to the investigation, while workers also described recruitment or other debts that could make leaving employment financially difficult. Nearly all reportedly worked excessive hours, and researchers described cases involving unsafe conditions, inadequate medical treatment and limited ability to communicate with people ashore.

One fisher interviewed by researchers described being injured while working aboard a vessel after his finger was severed and others were broken. According to his account, he requested that the vessel divert so he could receive medical care but did not reach Taiwan for treatment until 11 days later. Other fishers described injuries, exhaustion and fear of challenging captains or recruiters. These accounts remain worker testimony rather than judicial findings, but together they form part of the body of evidence used by Global Labor Justice in reaching its conclusions.

What Makes Work at Sea Different

The physical isolation of fishing fundamentally changes the balance of power between a worker and an employer. On land, even workers in highly exploitative workplaces may theoretically be able to leave the premises, contact relatives, speak to authorities or approach another employer. At sea, those options can disappear for weeks or months because the workplace itself is moving through international waters and the worker may be hundreds of miles from the nearest port.

Commercial fishing is also inherently dangerous. Workers may handle hooks, lines, heavy equipment and moving machinery on wet decks while working long hours in difficult weather, and the ILO identifies capture fishing as an industry with one of the world’s highest occupational fatality rates. When excessive working hours and inadequate rest are added to that environment, the dangers can increase further, particularly if injured workers have limited access to medical treatment.

Isolation also creates a monitoring problem. Workplace inspections generally occur while vessels are in port, yet some of the most important evidence of labor conditions exists while they are operating offshore. The ILO has consequently developed specific guidance for detecting forced labor in commercial fishing, recognizing that authorities need different tools from those used in ordinary land-based workplaces.

This is one reason communication access has become such an important issue for fisher organizations. Reliable Wi-Fi aboard a vessel may sound secondary compared with wages or physical safety, but for a migrant worker spending months offshore it can determine whether they can contact family members, obtain information about their wages, communicate with a union, report mistreatment or seek help in an emergency. FOSPI-PMFU has made guaranteed communication access one of its central demands to StarKist, alongside fair wages and contracts, workplace safety, freedom of association and access to an effective grievance mechanism.

How Recruitment Debt Can Become a Tool of Control

Many cases of forced labor begin long before workers reach the workplace. Migrant workers may pay recruiters or brokers to secure jobs overseas, sometimes borrowing substantial sums before earning their first paycheck. If the job turns out to involve different wages, hours or conditions from those promised, leaving can become financially impossible because returning home would mean carrying the debt without the income expected to repay it.

The International Labour Organization’s 2026 regional study found that high recruitment costs remain a significant problem across the fishing and seafood economy of Southeast Asia. It documented contract substitution, retention of identity documents, debt bondage, wage theft and forced labor alongside broader failures in worker protection, showing how exploitation can be built into the migration and recruitment process rather than beginning only once a vessel reaches sea.

Global Labor Justice says recruitment debt appeared repeatedly in its StarKist supply-chain investigation and argues that workers’ financial obligations, combined with employer-linked immigration status and limited freedom of movement, can make challenging abusive conditions extremely difficult. The significance of debt is therefore not simply that workers owe money. It becomes relevant to forced labor when financial pressure interacts with threats, deception, document control or other restrictions in a way that prevents somebody from freely leaving employment.

This is also why Not For Sale defines forced labor in fishing through the mechanisms that restrict freedom rather than by the nationality of the worker or the type of vessel involved. Confinement at sea, withheld wages, violence, debt, document confiscation, isolation, lack of medical care and inability to leave can all become components of forced labor when they are used to compel someone to continue working.

Is This Human Trafficking?

Forced labor and human trafficking frequently overlap in the fishing industry, but the terms should not automatically be treated as interchangeable. Human trafficking generally involves the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harboring or receipt of people for the purpose of exploitation through specified forms of force, fraud, coercion or abuse of vulnerability, while forced labor focuses on whether work is performed involuntarily under threat of penalty.

A migrant fisher may therefore be trafficked into forced labor if deceptive recruitment, debt or coercion is used to recruit and control them for the purpose of exploitation. Another worker may experience serious labor violations without every legal element of human trafficking being established. The current Global Labor Justice investigation is principally framed around forced labor, and this article uses that terminology rather than applying a trafficking label more broadly than the available evidence supports.

The distinction matters because accurate language strengthens accountability. Not every bad workplace is forced labor, and not every forced-labor situation automatically establishes human trafficking. At the same time, the ILO recognizes both forced labor and human trafficking as serious risks in fisheries, particularly among migrant workers who can be exposed to deceptive recruitment, debt bondage and coercion before and during their employment.

What StarKist Says About Responsible Sourcing

StarKist’s published policies prohibit forced labor. The company’s Code of Conduct states that it does not permit forced, trafficked, slave, indentured, prison, child or bonded labor among manufacturing operations covered by the code, while its corporate-responsibility materials say StarKist participates in Sedex and the Seafood Task Force and expects seafood suppliers to acknowledge standards covering fair labor practices.

When the Washington Post asked StarKist to respond directly to the findings of the Global Labor Justice investigation, StarKist referred the newspaper to a statement from the National Seafood Association. The industry organization said it takes allegations of worker mistreatment seriously and that its members are committed to supply chains free from labor abuse, while arguing that specific and actionable concerns should be quickly reported to law-enforcement agencies and regulators so they can be investigated.

The response highlights an important question at the center of corporate supply-chain responsibility. Is the role of a multinational brand primarily to establish standards and respond when individual violations are identified, or does purchasing power create a broader responsibility to identify structural labor risks before specific cases reach authorities? Global Labor Justice and FOSPI-PMFU argue for the latter, saying repeated patterns across recruitment, employment and working conditions indicate a supply-chain problem that cannot be addressed solely as a series of isolated incidents. StarKist has not publicly accepted that characterization in the reporting reviewed for this article.

Taiwan Has Changed Its Fishing Rules, but the Debate Is Not Over

Taiwan operates one of the world’s most significant distant-water fishing industries and has faced sustained international scrutiny over labor conditions aboard parts of its fleet. The Taiwanese government says it has responded by strengthening regulation through its Fisheries and Human Rights Action Plan, increasing oversight of recruitment agencies, improving monitoring and inspections, and pursuing international cooperation intended to protect migrant crew members.

In July 2026, Taiwan’s Fisheries Agency highlighted a positive determination from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration concerning issues raised in an earlier U.S. assessment. The agency said the determination recognized measures Taiwan had taken to address previously identified illegal-fishing and forced-labor concerns, and argued that its reforms had strengthened protection for distant-water crews.

That progress deserves to be recognized, but it does not resolve the allegations contained in the new StarKist investigation. The two findings can exist simultaneously: governments can improve regulatory systems while workers continue to encounter serious abuse within parts of a large and geographically dispersed fleet. Effective reform therefore depends not only on rules existing but on whether workers can use them safely, whether inspections reach the conditions that occur offshore and whether employers and recruiters face meaningful consequences when protections are violated.

The problem is not unique to Taiwan. The ILO’s 2026 regional research covers migrant fishing and seafood workers across several origin and destination countries and concludes that severe labor-rights problems remain widespread throughout parts of the Asian blue economy. Taiwan is an important part of that system, but it is not the entire system.

Can Tuna Be Environmentally Sustainable but Socially Exploitative?

The investigation also exposes a distinction that consumers are rarely asked to consider. When seafood is described as sustainable, the term often refers primarily to the condition of fish stocks, fishing methods, bycatch, ecosystem impact and fisheries management. Those are essential questions, but they do not necessarily tell a consumer how the people aboard the vessel were treated.

StarKist says all tuna and salmon it procures are purchased from third-party suppliers meeting Marine Stewardship Council sustainability standards or working toward certification through qualifying improvement programs, and the company says it aims to purchase 100 percent of its tuna and salmon from MSC-certified fisheries by the end of 2026. Those environmental commitments address important questions about fishery sustainability, but the current forced-labor allegations illustrate why ecological and labor performance need to be evaluated separately as well as together.

A fishing operation can theoretically manage fish stocks responsibly while failing workers, just as a company can improve labor conditions while fishing unsustainably. Genuine sustainability therefore requires both questions to be asked at the same time: is the ecosystem being protected, and are the people working within it protected as well?

That intersection is central to Not For Sale’s understanding of modern-day slavery and ecocide. Environmental protection that ignores workers can leave exploitation untouched, while labor reform that ignores ecological collapse can leave communities dependent on an industry that is gradually destroying the resource on which their livelihoods depend. The better objective is a seafood economy in which healthy oceans and dignified work are treated as parts of the same system rather than competing priorities.

What the Fishers Are Asking For

One of the most important aspects of the current story is that the workers are not simply being presented as victims waiting for somebody else to design a solution. FOSPI-PMFU has developed a specific set of demands and is asking StarKist to negotiate directly with the union through what campaign organizers describe as an enforceable brand agreement.

The proposal includes guaranteed Wi-Fi and meaningful communication access while vessels are at sea, fair wages and employment contracts, healthy and safe workplaces, freedom to organize without intimidation or retaliation, and a transparent grievance system that allows workers to report problems and obtain remedy. The campaign argues that these protections should be enforceable rather than voluntary, giving workers themselves a role in monitoring and improving conditions across the supply chain.

FOSPI-PMFU and Global Labor Justice also filed a complaint on September 17 against StarKist’s South Korean parent company, Dongwon Industries, with South Korea’s National Contact Point for the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises. The complaint is intended to initiate a process through which the parties could discuss the alleged supply-chain failures and the union’s demand for a binding agreement. Filing such a complaint is not itself a finding that Dongwon or StarKist violated the OECD Guidelines.

The distinction is significant because much corporate labor governance still depends on audits, supplier codes and certification programs designed primarily by companies or third parties. Worker-led agreements attempt to introduce a different source of oversight by giving the people performing the work a direct role in identifying risks and enforcing protections.

Why Audits Alone Cannot See Everything

Audits can help identify poor conditions, but fishing presents an unusual challenge because the workplace may be thousands of miles away when the abuse occurs. Inspecting a vessel in port does not necessarily reveal what happened during months at sea, and interviewing a worker while a captain, recruiter or employer controls their future employment can make honest disclosure difficult.

Supply chains create another layer of distance. Global Labor Justice says its investigation identified hundreds of vessels linked to StarKist’s Pacific albacore supply system. Fish can move from individual vessels through buyers, ports, processors and canneries before reaching branded products, meaning the company whose name appears on the package may not directly employ the person who caught the fish.

This structure does not remove corporate responsibility, but it changes what effective responsibility requires. A brand needs to understand not only its immediate suppliers but the recruitment systems, vessel owners, labor brokers and employment conditions operating farther upstream. It also needs mechanisms capable of receiving information directly from workers without forcing them to risk retaliation in order to raise a concern.

Not For Sale has encountered the same basic problem across other industries. Whether the commodity is seafood, timber, minerals or agricultural goods, exploitation frequently becomes easier to hide as the distance between the person doing the work and the company selling the finished product grows. Supply-chain transparency is therefore not just about knowing where something came from geographically. It is about preserving information about the conditions under which it was produced.

What Social Innovation Could Look Like at Sea

Not For Sale’s approach to modern-day slavery has increasingly focused on changing the economic systems that make exploitation profitable rather than treating rescue as the only intervention. In its work across agriculture, forests, critical minerals and other supply chains, the principle is that prevention becomes more durable when workers and communities gain economic leverage and when businesses are redesigned so that responsible production has commercial value.

In fishing, that could mean strengthening worker organizations, eliminating recruitment fees that push migrants into debt, guaranteeing communications access at sea, creating independent grievance channels, improving port inspections and ensuring brands can trace labor conditions as seriously as they trace the fish itself. It could also mean using purchasing contracts to reward vessels and suppliers that meet credible labor standards rather than relying on voluntary declarations after abuses occur.

The Freedom for Fishers campaign is therefore important beyond the specific dispute involving StarKist because it tests whether migrant fishers themselves can become participants in supply-chain governance. If workers are able to communicate independently, organize collectively and trigger effective remedies when conditions deteriorate, oversight no longer depends entirely on whether an external auditor happens to find the problem.

This is the kind of social innovation Not For Sale means when it talks about out-creating exploitation. The objective is not simply to identify a bad actor after abuse has taken place, but to redesign the system so that workers have enough information, bargaining power and freedom to make exploitation harder to sustain in the first place.

What Governments and Companies Need to Do

Governments have a fundamental responsibility to regulate recruitment agencies, protect migrant workers, inspect vessels and enforce labor laws, but distant-water fishing requires cooperation across borders because recruitment, vessel ownership, flag states, ports, processors and consumer markets may all fall under different jurisdictions. The ILO has called for stronger regulation of fair recruitment, labor-sensitive vessel inspections, grievance mechanisms and international cooperation across tuna supply chains.

Companies meanwhile need to move beyond policies that prohibit forced labor in principle and demonstrate how those policies operate when serious risks appear several tiers upstream. That requires mapping vessels and recruiters, speaking directly with workers, identifying recruitment debt, ensuring passports and identity documents remain accessible to workers, investigating excessive working hours, verifying medical protections and ensuring complaints can be raised without losing a job or immigration status.

Retailers and seafood brands also need to avoid treating environmental sustainability and labor rights as separate conversations occurring in different departments. Consumers increasingly encounter labels explaining how a fish was caught or whether a stock is sustainably managed, but comparable information about the people doing the catching remains much harder to find.

What Not For Sale’s Perspective Adds

Not For Sale has spent years examining how forced labor becomes embedded in ordinary products, including seafood. Our earlier research into Thailand’s fishing industry found that isolation offshore can turn already exploitative recruitment and employment practices into something far harder to escape, because the physical possibility of leaving disappears once a worker is at sea.

The StarKist investigation demonstrates why that analysis remains relevant. The brand on the supermarket shelf is only the final visible point in an international system involving workers, recruiters, vessel owners, ports, suppliers, processors and regulators. When each part of that system sees only its immediate responsibility, the person with the least power can end up carrying the greatest risk.

There is another lesson as well. Migrant fishers should not be reduced to anonymous evidence of abuse. FOSPI-PMFU’s campaign is worker-led, and the union is proposing practical changes to the conditions its members understand firsthand. That is important because effective anti-trafficking and forced-labor strategies work best when people affected by exploitation have agency in designing the systems intended to protect them.

For Not For Sale, this is the point at which human trafficking prevention and social innovation meet. The goal is not merely to expose exploitation somewhere offshore. It is to help build a seafood economy in which the worker aboard the vessel has enough rights, communication, bargaining power and economic security that exploitation becomes more difficult to impose and easier to challenge.

What Readers Can Do

The responsibility for preventing forced labor in fishing rests primarily with companies, governments and the institutions governing international trade rather than with an individual standing in a supermarket aisle. Consumers can nevertheless ask better questions about the seafood they buy, including whether companies publish vessel-level supply-chain information, what labor standards apply aboard supplying vessels, how migrant workers can report abuse and whether workers themselves participate in monitoring those systems.

Institutional purchasers have even greater leverage. Restaurants, retailers, food-service companies, universities and other organizations purchasing seafood at scale can include labor protections alongside environmental requirements when selecting suppliers, helping make worker rights part of the commercial definition of responsible seafood rather than an optional extra.

Readers can also support worker organizations and survivor-centered groups working directly with migrant communities. The people closest to exploitation frequently understand both the mechanisms that create it and the interventions most likely to work, which is why worker voice should be treated as part of the solution rather than simply as testimony used after something has gone wrong.

The most unsettling thing about forced labor in fishing is the distance between the person doing the work and the person consuming its result. A fisher may spend months aboard a vessel in the Pacific while the tuna eventually appears in a supermarket thousands of miles away, transformed into an inexpensive and familiar product whose packaging reveals almost nothing about the labor journey behind it.

The new investigation into StarKist’s Pacific albacore supply chain does not establish that all StarKist tuna is connected to forced labor, nor does it establish wrongdoing across every vessel supplying the company. What it does provide is substantial worker testimony and a detailed supply-chain investigation alleging that serious forced-labor risks occurred repeatedly among the fishers and vessels studied, at a moment when international research is independently showing that migrant fishers across the region face unusually high levels of coercion and exploitation.

The deeper challenge is therefore not simply determining what happened aboard 37 vessels. It is deciding what a responsible seafood system should look like when the workplace is remote, the supply chain is international and the people with the least power are frequently the farthest from anyone able to see what is happening.

A sustainable ocean cannot be built on expendable workers. If the seafood industry wants sustainability to mean something more than protecting fish stocks, the freedom and dignity of the people catching those fish have to become part of the definition.

Frequently Asked Questions

What has StarKist been accused of?

Global Labor Justice and the migrant fisher union FOSPI-PMFU allege that forced-labor conditions occurred aboard Taiwan-flagged or Taiwanese-owned vessels supplying Pacific albacore tuna to StarKist. Their investigation interviewed 92 predominantly Indonesian migrant fishers who had worked on 37 vessels and identified forced-labor indicators across all interviews, while assessing 62 fishers on 27 vessels as having experienced conditions sufficient to meet the forced-labor threshold used by researchers.

Did investigators prove that all StarKist tuna involves forced labor?

No. The investigation studied workers from 37 vessels within a much larger supply chain and should not be used to claim that every StarKist product or supplying vessel is associated with forced labor. The significance of the investigation is the repeated pattern researchers say they identified among the workers and vessels they examined.

What forced-labor indicators did workers describe?

Workers reported conditions including recruitment debt, passport retention, excessive working hours, isolation at sea, inadequate medical care, poor working conditions and fear of retaliation. The ILO recognizes factors such as document retention, debt bondage, abuse of vulnerability, isolation, intimidation and excessive overtime as potential indicators used in assessing forced labor.

Why are migrant fishers particularly vulnerable?

Migrant fishers can be dependent on recruiters, employers and immigration arrangements while working far offshore for extended periods. Once at sea, leaving employment may be physically impossible, while limited communications, debt and document retention can further reduce a worker’s ability to seek assistance.

Is forced labor common in fishing?

The ILO’s 2026 regional survey estimated that approximately 20 percent of migrant fishers surveyed in selected South-East Asian origin and destination countries were in forced-labor situations. The figure applies to the population studied and should not be interpreted as meaning one in five fishers globally experiences forced labor.

What has StarKist said?

StarKist did not directly answer the Washington Post’s questions about the Global Labor Justice findings and instead referred the newspaper to the National Seafood Association, which said allegations of worker mistreatment are taken seriously and should be reported promptly to appropriate authorities. StarKist’s published Code of Conduct prohibits forced labor, and its corporate-responsibility policies state that suppliers are expected to follow responsible labor standards.

What is FOSPI-PMFU asking StarKist to do?

The union is asking StarKist to negotiate a binding agreement covering guaranteed communications access while workers are at sea, fair wages and contracts, healthy and safe workplaces, freedom of association without retaliation and a transparent grievance and remedy system.

Has Taiwan taken action on forced labor in fishing?

Taiwan says it has strengthened labor protections through its Fisheries and Human Rights Action Plan, regulation of recruitment agencies, inspections and international cooperation. In 2026, Taiwan also received a positive U.S. determination concerning previously identified fishing and forced-labor issues, although worker organizations continue to argue that significant problems remain within parts of the distant-water fleet.

Does sustainable tuna certification guarantee there is no forced labor?

Not necessarily. Environmental certification and fishery-improvement programs often focus heavily on fish stocks, fishing practices and ecosystem management, while labor conditions may be assessed through separate standards or processes. The StarKist allegations demonstrate why environmental and social sustainability need to be considered together rather than treating one as proof of the other.

What is an enforceable brand agreement?

An enforceable brand agreement is a negotiated arrangement in which a brand commits to workplace standards that workers or their representatives can help monitor and enforce. FOSPI-PMFU argues that such an agreement could provide stronger protection than voluntary policies alone because workers would have a formal role in identifying problems and obtaining remedies.

How does this connect to human trafficking?

Forced labor can be one purpose of human trafficking when workers are recruited, transported or controlled for exploitation through force, fraud, coercion or abuse of vulnerability. Not every forced-labor case automatically satisfies every legal element of trafficking, however, which is why the two terms should be used carefully.

What can seafood companies do to prevent forced labor?

Companies can map vessels and recruitment agencies throughout their supply chains, prohibit worker-paid recruitment fees, ensure workers retain access to identity documents, guarantee meaningful communication at sea, consult worker organizations, monitor working hours and medical conditions, operate independent grievance mechanisms and take corrective action when abuses are discovered.