Adrian Basar did not want to become a distant-water fisherman. With 22-hour workdays and pay of around 450 dollars per month, it’s not the most glamorous—or fulfilling, or generally safe—job. But Basar took it to help support his seven-sibling family. One of them is currently in university, studying mathematics.
“I support them so they can go to school,” Basar told me, speaking in Indonesian through an interpreter. I met him at a major seafood industry conference last month, where he and another fisherman had come to tell corporate executives about their lives on the ships.
“I took these steps because I figure, if I can support them, they can get a better education than I did,” he said.
Basar is part of a distant-water fleet of Indonesian migrant fishermen who work for Taiwan’s massive fishing market. They fish thousands of pounds of tuna that is sold all over the world, including in some cases to U.S. consumers.
But for 10 months out of the year, when he’s out at sea, Basar can’t talk to his siblings, or anyone in his family, because he’s not allowed to use the Wi-Fi on the ship.
“I think the companies that don’t want to put Wi-Fi on their ships pray for things not to be revealed,” Basar said. “There are many companies that don’t want Wi-Fi.”
A coalition between a self-organized Indonesian fishers’ union, a Taiwanese human rights group and multiple global labor organizations is trying to change that.
The “Wi-Fi Now for Fishers’ Rights” campaign, which has been organizing since 2023, wants to make Wi-Fi access a standard in the industry, both to help improve working conditions through union organizing and to allow the workers to have contact with other human beings for more than two months per year.
A fishing port in Taiwan. Photo credit: Global Labor Justice
“We spend a long time in the ocean,” another fisherman, Silwanus Tangkotta, told me in Indonesian through an interpreter. He recalled one of his voyages that had lasted over a year. “For more than one year, I didn’t have any contact with my family. When I came to shore, I didn’t know that my family member had passed away. My family is very worried. Three or four years, no news—they sometimes worry that I’m dead already. So, Wi-Fi is very important.”
Zacari Edwards, a senior strategist for Global Labor Justice (GLJ), which has taken on the Wi-Fi campaign, said the lack of internet access on ships makes it difficult for any sort of union organizing to take place.
“ We have the unions, but then when they’re out at sea, at their place of work, where the companies need to know what the working conditions are, they’re isolated by design,” Edwards told a group of seafood executives at the Seafood Expo North America conference in March. The Indonesian fishers’ union, Forum Silaturahmi Pelaut Indonesia (FOSPI), first organized 18 years ago.
“We cannot ask for help, we cannot use our phones. But the captain is in charge, and the captain can use it. The only one that has access is the captain.”
“ Workers can’t contact their unions,” Edwards continued. “It just seems a bit nonsensical to me, especially when it is an easy ask, it’s an ask that’s been delivered clearly. I really do doubt the validity of any company’s human rights protections policy when they’re not addressing that ‘black box’ place at work.”
The fishers’ working conditions are often grim. Basar, for example, said he works 22-hour days, often with broken equipment. The ship’s food supply is also usually made to last for three months, which means that the fishermen must eat fish bait for the remaining seven. Without Wi-Fi, Basar said, he can’t communicate with anyone outside of the boat, either about his working conditions or anything else.
“No one can actually oversee what’s going on on the ships,” Basar told me. “We feel very isolated out there. We cannot ask for help, we cannot use our phones. But the captain is in charge, and the captain can use it. The only one that has access is the captain.”
In some cases, the lack of Wi-Fi is a legitimate medical concern. Under international law, all workers aboard a vessel must be given reasonable access to communication, particularly for medical reasons. Basar lost a friend to illness on the ship last year, because he could not contact anyone in the outside world to try to get him medication. Tangkotta lost two fingers to a slamming door in a storm, and couldn’t get access to medical treatment for two months. For the first month, he kept working.
“ It was really terrible and scary because I could see the bones coming out,” Tangkotta said, speaking to the same group of seafood executives. “There was a lot of blood, and I had to take care of it myself with limited resources. I did a surgery by myself using nail clippers and toothpicks, and it took four days. Maybe if I had Wi-Fi, I might have been able to contact someone to help me.”
But technology isn’t the problem. According to GLJ, there’s no difficulty in putting Wi-Fi on boats—around 60 percent of the boats they’re involved with already have it installed.
“It’s not a barrier to get the technology installed,” Edwards said. “But [FOSPI] has reported back that only about two percent of all the vessels their members are on have reported any form of access.”
And according to a GLJ briefing paper, there’s no cost barrier to installing it either. For example, Iridium Communications, one of the major technology companies that provides maritime Wi-Fi, has a total cost of $14,960 for installation and the first year of fees.
“The costs of installing Wi-Fi and the monthly fees…are within an affordable range for the Taiwanese distant water fishing industry,” the briefing states. “The construction fee for a small tuna longline fishing vessel is around $500,000 USD.” The monthly fee costs are also equivalent to the salary of one worker aboard the ship.
“The problem is when access to Wi-Fi on the high seas is not embedded in an agreement,” Edwards said. “You’re always going to lose it when the workers need it most. We see it get switched off. We hear those stories from fishers.”
Global Labor Justice has proposed a set of Wi-Fi guidelines for Taiwanese fisheries to sign on to, in order to have some form of legally enforceable agreement. Those guidelines suggest a minimum of 3GB free per month per worker, with more data purchasable. With a crew of around 15, that would amount to a total of 45GB per month, or 450GB for a full trip. For comparison, an average household in the U.S. uses a minimum of 500GB per month.
The guidelines also include equal access regardless of crew rank and guaranteed data privacy, and stipulate that any data used for health issues should not be deducted from a worker’s data allowance.
As of now, though, those guidelines do not constitute a legally enforceable agreement. To get one, a trade union representing the fishers would have to sign agreements with individual Taiwanese fisheries, or possibly the Taiwanese government.
“ We as fishermen, we do not need empty promises,” Tangkotta said. “We need full protection that is real, starting with the access of Wi-Fi that is free, that is guaranteed on all vessels. If I had the Wi-Fi, I’d be able to reach my family.”
