TL;DR - As Shuck said, what about the slave labor for seafood? I find lots of dressing and no real evidence of any abatement to slavery tied to Costco’s seafood.
I advocated for human rights in SE Asia for many years. I have met former forced laborers, written and forwarded human rights reports to US government and corporate leaders, testified and got execs on record, and organized hundreds of public demonstrations with exiles in the US. I married into a family of prisoners of conscience. Except for fate, they could easily be the people now forced into slavery to provide seafood to Costco.
I also advocated for and against various approaches to sustainability and have encountered many window dressing schemes, failed accountability measures, and a few groups that had their ducks more in a row. I have moved on from this (largely volunteer) work. But, whenever I dig into this kind of thing and the PR responses I can quickly read between the lines (I did so in BB comments about a similar initiative on Palm Oil, which I’ve said as a sustainability initiative is now dead in the water and the story has been forgotten).
(see @Shuck’s reply here for other links)
Bloomberg, January 2017,
Costco won dismissal of a lawsuit claiming it didn’t disclose to customers that it was selling farmed shrimp from Thailand fed a diet of cheap fish caught at sea with unpaid, forced labor.
A San Francisco federal judge threw out the case Tuesday, finding that the consumers who filed it failed to allege the company had a duty to disclose the information about labor abuses in its supply chain.
So they weren’t defending against the actual allegations of labor abuses in Costco’s supply chain.
Um. Sorry it’s NY Post but
Um.
https://www.costco.com/sustainability-human-rights.html
It’s a hot mess.
Concerns about forced labor in the Thai fishing industry had already come to light by 2013. The “seafood task force” that Costco is involved with alongside Thailand’s fishing industry, a bunch of other big US retailers, pet food and seafood companies has only in 2019 established a “pilot program.” I have poked around the website and a deeper dive follows so this is a long post.
Like many task forces formed to allay public concern by kicking the can down the road, I’m seeing burial of real accountability, a set up to blame the victim (such as through a “crowdsourcing” phone app to make reports), and since January 2019 with almost all the other activity on the website to quiet public outrage in 2016-2017, it has largely fallen silent.
The same exec from Costco who made the announcement about this response to PETA is the chair of the Seafood Task Force. Governance and bylaws referenced on the site, probably as a “to do list” item in 2016, are not posted - rather, the site says to contact their secretariat. It’s a good gig if you can get it. To their credit they do have the more important Codes of Conduct posted under resources.
Bookkeeping for this fiercely independent watchdog is provided by the US Nation Fisheries Institute.
Here’s a major red flag. I’m looking over their “vessel auditable standards” document and here’s what it says under “Forced Labor”:
Workers have the freedom to terminate their employment exercised at the
next regularly scheduled port visit with a minimum notice of 10 days before
said port visit.
Do you think the ship captain is going to tell slave labor of a port visit eleven days ahead of time? Yes there are many other bylaws explaining that forced labor should not happen in the first place, but this is the kind of rule that a captain will quote to an illiterate laborer to trick them into staying on board (as has happened throughout the history of slavery, indentured servitude and just regular old non-union employment).
Another red flag. There is some involvement of the Thai royals and government, but nothing in there about the navy/coast guard/enforcement entities. They exist. If Thai fishing boats stray into Myanmar they are shot at, and vice versa for Myanmar flagged vessels. In other words, they very actively and rigorously patrol and enforce their fishing rights, but those enforcement entities are doing jack squat about human rights.
Finally, look at how the NGO’s (which have eyes on slave labor) are kept at arms reach in the governance structure (at least as graphically represented where they are literally grayed out):
“ESA” = External Stakeholder Group. There is a lot about governance on the website but no list of who’s onboard. There is mention elsewhere on the site of an organization called Humanity United so I have reached out to them for feedback.
Another generic “see, we’re accountable”/“look how busy we are” graphic:
What we do have from them is a PDF report dated December 2018 admitting of this entity (formed in June 2014) that “we have underestimated the scale of some of these challenges.” I think that corporate execs are often thrown on these boards and they think leveraging the $7B US value for Thai seafood will somehow enable them to eliminate slavery while still buying the same amount of product from the same people.
Jump forward and in February 2020 they are congratulating the Prime Minister of Thailand (the army general who took over in a bloodless coup in 2014 and was later “elected”) in a letter alluding to a job well done.
Something’s missing.
