BANGKOK: Thailand for 6,000 baht ($192) two years ago, Win from Myanmar worked as a fisherman until he lost his forearm in an accident on the vessel this year.
Toiling for 19 hours a day, Win said the crew of 30 sometimes would not get any rest during peak season, with a United Nations team in Thailand this week to investigate such reports of abusive working conditions.
“Life is difficult as a fisherman in Myanmar so I thought it would make my life better if I come and work in Thailand,” the father of four, 39, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
“The ‘agent’ did not tell me what work I was going to do or how much I would be paid. I just ended up working on the boat.”
The world’s third largest seafood exporter, Thailand’s fishing industry employs more than 300,000 people, many of them migrant workers from neighboring countries, and the sector has long been dogged by allegations of abuses.
The industry is under further international scrutiny this week as a team of United Nations experts undertake their first visit to examine human rights in a wide range of businesses in Thailand, including the fishing and seafood sectors.
Thailand’s multi billion-dollar seafood sector has come under scrutiny in recent years after investigations by the media and human rights groups showed slavery, trafficking and violence on fishing boats and at onshore processing facilities.
The military, which took power in a 2014 coup, has rolled out reforms since the European Union threatened in 2015 to ban fish imports from the Southeast Asian nation unless it cleaned up the industry.
More than a third of migrant fishermen in Thailand were victims of trafficking, according to a study of 260 fishermen by anti-trafficking group the International Justice Mission last year.
A spokesman from the UN Working Group on Business and Human Rights said the group would meet officials, activists and migrant workers during its 10-day mission to Thailand to ascertain whether the government measures have been effective.