‘Slave Free Seas’: Ethics and social action

Date: 6 November 2013 Time: 12.00 pm

Abstract
New Zealand fishing companies chartering foreign fishing vessels have been implicated in human rights abuses of their crews. The vessels are now typically owned by Korean companies with Korean officers, while crew are mostly Indonesian. The abuses included physical and sexual violence, with-holding of pay and very low pay, extreme working hours and dangerous working conditions. International campaigners against these practices framed the consumption of New Zealand seafood products as ‘slavery on a plate’. There was active global campaigning by international maritime unions and NGOs such as the global anti-slavery organisation, The Mekong Club,linked to campaigns by local unions and the local NGO ‘Slave Free Seas’.
Intensifying debates over this issue culminated in a 2012 government decision that all workers on New Zealand-chartered vessels would come under the protection of New Zealand employment law from 2016. We analyse the various arguments made by the local and global actors in this case, including geopolitical and economic as well as ethical concerns. Drawing on Hargrave’s (2009) synthesis of the concept of the ‘moral imagination’ and of a collective action model of social change, we explore how a provisional (and still contested) political consensus was achieved. In particular we consider how the rhetoric of ‘slavery’ was used to intensify the ethical imagination of key communities of interest.
About the presenters
Deborah Jones is an Associate Professor in the School of Management at Victoria Business School. She teaches a course on Organisations and Ethics, and this seminar is based on material developed for it. Her current research interests include working lives and policy in the film industry, and sexual identity and orientation in the workplace.
Ben Butler-Hogg completed his BCA in 2012. He worked on the ‘Slave-Free Seas’ case on a Summer Research Scholarship in 2012-2013. He is now working at Ernst & Young, Wellington.

For further information please contact Jim Sheffield,
School of Management Jim.Sheffield@vuw.ac.nz Ph. (04) 463 5085