Labour Exploitation in Sashimi Tuna Production: Capital, Ecology, and Labour in South Korea and Taiwan Longline Industries

This paper examines the complexity of between firms and ecology and how it articulates with the conditions of labour exploitation in one of the sectors at the heart of the ‘modern slavery’ debate, namely the transnational tuna longline industries in South Korea and Taiwan. Since the 1990s, the mature tuna commodity frontier has been accelerated by an increase in the fishing efforts of industrial tuna fishing vessels. The deterioration of ecological surplus has resulted in an intensification of geopolitical tensions between the ‘resource seekers’ and the ‘resource holders’ (Campling et al., 2024), within the context of ‘property regimes at sea’ (Campling and Colas, 2018). This has led to a notable transformation of the operational geography of fishing vessels, creating a de facto dis-embeddedness of longline operations from territorial and institutional control, despite the fact that international fishing vessels are subject to the control and regulation of their flag states. Given that, the focus of this paper is threefold: 1) to analyse how the geography and territoriality of fishing operations driven by ecological decline are articulated with the scope and intensity of labour processes and labour relations; 2) to examine the conflicting roles of the state as a facilitator for the accumulation of fishing firms and as a mediator for capital-labour relations; 3) to investigate how these two axes relate to and affect labour regimes at sea, posing significant and distinctive challenges to crew organising and voices. The article contributes to labour regime analysis by taking into account the ecological specificities of work at sea, including the materiality of the sea, the commodity, and the vessels.