S2 E7: The unspoken cost of seafood (China Pt. 2)

·43 min·3 clips

A worker named Daniel died from beriberi after being beaten and starved on a Chinese squid jigger, revealing rampant abuses in the fleet.

The story begins with Daniel. He was a worker from Indonesia on the Chinese squid jigger Zenfa 7, where he was beaten, starved, and kept from leaving before he was brought ashore in Uruguay. Beriberi killed him there. It was preventable, which makes the detail land harder. The transcript puts his death beside workers trapped at sea for as long as three years. Pay was shaky too: workers described wages cut for food, drinking water, safety equipment, and medicine. Then the reporting moves inland. It follows Uyghurs from Xinjiang into factories and farms after international pressure. Detention figures dropped in the past few years, but the host argues the system did not end so much as move. Distance did some of the work. Transfers sent people thousands of miles away, split families, and put workers in provinces that needed factory labor. Refusal barely counted as a choice: accept work somewhere else or risk being sent back toward internment camps. The damage shows up in Chinese government figures too. Between 2017 and 2019, birth rates in Xinjiang fell by almost half. Seafood plants then come into view. The investigation says Chinese processing facilities were tied to Uyghur workers and forced labor from North Korea. That runs into UN sanctions and US law, and it makes exported seafood feel a lot less clean than the label suggests.

As heard by us

A seafood investigation that traces labor abuse from a squid jigger to factory labor and beyond.

This episode tracks the hidden labor system behind seafood, moving from a Chinese squid jigger to the ports and factories that keep the catch moving.

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Why you'd press play

If you want seafood reporting that follows the labor chain all the way to shore.

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