In 1973, thousands of fisheries workers lined the streets of a small coastal city in Peru demanding reform. This protest emerged on the heels of the collapse of the world’s largest fishery: the Peruvian small anchovy, also known as the anchoveta (Engraulis ringens). (Approximately 10% of all fish caught today are anchoveta.) It also kickstarted over two decades of social movement activism in and around the fishery, which was focused, in large part, on dismantling the capitalist economic system that workers believed had led to the collapse. In the short-term, labor unions involved in la lucha (worker’s struggle) were successful in pushing for the nationalization of the fishery, however, they were unsuccessful in the long-term as neoliberal reforms took root in the early 1990s to effectively ban unions and reprivatize the fishery. Despite the political outcomes, laborers played a crucial role in shifting the scientific gaze of marine biologists and sociologists in Peru to from an exclusive focus on maximizing catch to considering contamination from fishmeal factories along the coast (Porcelli 2022a).
This snapshot is important because it shows that fisheries can be sites of progressive social and scientific change and that organized labor can be the driver of those changes. The capacity to do so, however, has been undermined by the expansion of neoliberal institutions since the 1980s to manage and monitor the world’s marine spaces (from ITQs to the rise of private equity). While the forms of resistance that do emerge often seek to re-embed market-driven reforms within management (i.e. higher prices for catches), several cases, such as the aftermath of the anchoveta collapse, demonstrate the opportunity for new fonts of environmental knowledge production and, by extension, alternative approaches to policy-making in marine spaces–much of which, I argue, is tied to strength of labor unions and organizing.
How does this happen?
Put simply, environmental knowledge lies at the intersection of two often opposing forces: state-level policies and industry actors, on the one side, and civil society actors on the other. Those in power work diligently to maintain power by controlling environmental knowledge or the lack thereof—a process that David Hess (2016) defines as the production of “undone science”. He writes, “the idea of undone science draws attention to a kind of non-knowledge that is systematically produced through the unequal distribution of power in society, where reformers who advocate for a broad public interest find that the research that would support their views, or at least illuminate the epistemic claims that they wish to evaluate, is simply not there.” Civil society groups, like labor unions, can be effective at getting undone science “done” by pushing for scientific, political, and social reform upstream at the state, industry, and federal level.
Neoliberal policies in the 1980s led to the dismantling of unions throughout the US, thus eroding the knowledge-producing capacity of workers and their ability to contribute to environmental governance. In addition, long-held notions that labor is inherently at odds with environmental knowledge production and concern (at least in the US) have continued to persist today (for an exception see Sicotte, Joyce, and Hesse’s work on labor unions in the energy sector). Taken together, neoliberal policies not only weakened the political capacity for activism within the fishing industry, but also, by extension, perpetuated the stereotype that the working-class is in conflict with, and even uninterested in, environmental protection.
Let’s take a deeper dive into a specific case:
Historically, New England fisheries were a hotbed of labor organizing and activism. Initially drawn to New England for the whaling industry, Cape Verdean immigrants were some of the first voluntary African laborers to the US. After the Rhode Island whaling economy died out in the late 1800s, Cape Verdean maritime workers transitioned to other coastal economies such as cranberry bogs and docks. Manuel Quirino “Chief” Ledo and others, who labored on the waterfront to change working conditions, founded the International Longshoremen’s Association Local 1329 of Providence in 1933, which was a predominantly Cape Verdean union and played an important role in the much larger labor movement in Rhode Island in the 1940s. The trend of strong unions based in specific fisheries and close-knit ethnic groups persisted for the next several decades until the neoliberal era.
In New Bedford, Massachusetts—the most profitable port in the US and the largest on the East Coast—workers had a robust union until 1986. In 1985, as groundfish (specifically Atlantic cod) landings were declining and operation costs were rising, over 700 members of the New Bedford Fishermen’s Union went on strike. Ultimately, vessel owners won out and within a year the union was dissolved. This is a trend that played out in fisheries nationwide.
New struggles today, however, suggest that unions are coming back to New England. For example, Maine lobster fishers had long been recognized as independent contractors until 2013 when they formed a local charter with the International Association of Machinists (IAM): Lobster 207.
Since then, Lobster 207 has enabled workers in the lobster industry to put their environmental knowledge into policy by pushing for legislation that protects both livelihoods and natural resources. “For example, Lobster 207 worked with the Sierra Club to defeat a project which would have included dredging in Maine’s Penobscot Bay….Members have also engaged in solidarity with the wider labor movement, including helping to defeat a right-to-work bill in 2015.” (Link to full article here.)
All too often workers are seen as collateral damage in conservation and economic-based management decisions and irrelevant in the production of environmental knowledge used to inform those policy decisions. Perhaps that’s inevitable. But I would argue that workers are an essential aspect of the human dimensions of a fishery, or any maritime-based economy, and need to be systematically incorporated into policy-making—a process made possible by strengthening labor unions. The case of Lobster 207 is a good example of that.
By looking abroad (such as the case of Peru’s anchoveta fishery) and to the past (such as the history of labor in New England fisheries) we can appreciate the inextricable relationship between the industries of the sea, social movement activism, and the production of environmental knowledge. Some of this is captured in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association’s Voices from the Fisheries archive, which collects oral histories from maritime workers and, in so doing, documents worker-led changes in the US fishing industry (in addition to a wide variety of other topics). Archives like this are a small, but important step in exposing the legacy of labor in fisheries reform—which is all too often overlooked by mainstream neoliberal narratives of social change (Porcelli 2022b).
The Peruvian writer and labor activist, José Carlos Mariategui, once said, the worker is “not a spectator but an actor” in the great crises of our times. As we seek to undo some of the crises brought upon the world’s fisheries by neoliberalism, organized labor should, and I hope will, play an important role in getting “undone science” done and putting into practice progressive social change.
References
Porcelli, A. 2022a. “After the collapse: Evaluating undone science in the wake of a global environmental crisis.” Geoforum 132: 219-228.
Porcelli, A. 2022b. “Sources from below: A rebel archive rewrites maritime history of Peru’s cuarta region.” Historia Ambiental, Latinoamericana y Caribeña (HALAC) 12(3): 28-54.
Hess, D. 2016. Undone Science: Social Movements, Mobilized Publics, and Industrial Transitions. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.