A Question of Distance: Four Indonesian Fishers, a Tuna Giant, and the Law That Followed Them Home

By his own account, Akhmad first mistook the warmth in his boot for seawater. It was blood. He had opened his leg badly enough to see bone, and the vessel he was working, hundreds of miles from any port, had no sterile supplies and no intention of turning back. He bandaged it himself and kept fishing. That detail, one man dressing a wound that would not stop bleeding for two weeks, sits at the centre of a lawsuit a federal judge in San Diego has now refused, twice, to throw out.

Greenpeace USA activists outside the federal courthouse in San Diego, California, in solidarity with the Indonesian fishers suing Bumble Bee. © Sandy Huffaker Jr. / Greenpeace

On 12 June, Chief Judge Cynthia Bashant denied Bumble Bee Foods’ request to reconsider an earlier decision allowing the case to proceed, and refused to let the company take the question straight to a higher court. The plaintiffs are four Indonesian men, Akhmad and Syafi’i among them, who allege they were subjected to forced labour aboard distant-water tuna vessels in Bumble Bee’s supply chain: debt bondage, withheld pay, untreated injuries, threats against their families if they tried to leave. None of this has been proven. What the court decided is narrower and, in its way, more interesting: that the men are entitled to make their case at all.

Bumble Bee’s central argument was geographic. The abuse, if it happened, happened on the high seas and in foreign waters, well outside American jurisdiction, so American law should not reach it. The company was leaning on a reasonable instinct, since countries generally police what happens inside their own borders, not on someone else’s boat. But the fishers sued under the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, a statute with unusually long arms. Bashant found that Congress had given a clear enough signal that the law applies to conduct abroad when a US company knowingly benefits from it. The distance defence failed. For a company that sells roughly two in every five cans of albacore in American supermarkets, the ocean turned out not to be far enough away.

Here is the part most coverage skips, and the part I find hardest to stop thinking about. The reason a fisher can bleed for two weeks without seeing a doctor is not bad luck. It is design. Bumble Bee has been owned since 2020 by FCF, a Taiwanese company that is one of the three largest tuna traders on earth, and FCF’s supply chain ran on transshipment: a fleet of carrier and refuelling vessels that met the fishing boats out at sea, took the catch, handed over fuel and supplies, and let the boats stay out for months or years without ever calling at port. It is efficient. It is also a near-perfect machine for keeping workers out of reach of unions, inspectors, doctors, courts, and their own families. Conservationists have a tidy phrase for it: isolation at sea. The quieter argument in this lawsuit is that the isolation is not a side effect of industrial fishing. It is a feature someone is paying for.

It would be easy, and a little dishonest, to file this under unambiguous victory. The fishers have already lost something. In late May the same judge dismissed, with prejudice, their request for an injunction that would have forced Bumble Bee to change how it operates: secure Wi-Fi on every vessel, paid shore leave, a hard cap of three months at sea. The court reasoned that the four men are no longer at sea, so there is no ongoing harm to enjoin. What survives is the claim for damages. That is not nothing, since the prospect of writing a large cheque has reformed more corporate behaviour than any number of pledges. But the structural fixes the men asked for, the ones that might have helped the fishers still out there tonight, were exactly the part the court declined to order.

This is not happening in isolation, which is the other reason it matters. Prosecutors in Taiwan have brought criminal charges against a vessel captain and others over a worker’s death and trafficking. Indonesia, the largest single supplier of migrant fishers to the world’s distant-water fleets, ratified the international Work in Fishing Convention in May, which will eventually oblige it to guarantee conditions its citizens have rarely enjoyed at sea. Greenpeace, whose own investigations into Bumble Bee’s supply chain were cited by the judge, puts the number of fishers currently trapped in forced labour worldwide at around 128,000. Whatever one makes of that figure, the courts and the treaties are, slowly, starting to point the same way.

I have spent a long time around fisheries, long enough to have lost my appetite for the kind of conservation story where a villain is named and a moral delivered before the credits. The honest version is less comfortable. The supply chain that produced this case is the same one that produces the cheap, convenient, protein-rich tin most of us have in a cupboard. The men at the far end of it are not visible from the shelf, which is more or less the point of how the chain is built. A case like this one does something unusual. It makes the distance briefly legible. It puts a name, and a leg wound, at the end of a barcode.

What the San Diego ruling really establishes is not that Bumble Bee did these things; a trial may find otherwise, and the company denies it. It establishes that the open ocean is not a jurisdictional void where an American firm’s responsibilities quietly expire at the edge of the territorial sea. That is a small legal point with a long reach. I keep returning to Syafi’i, who wept when the case first survived and said he felt overwhelmed, not because the result was a triumph but because someone with the power to do so had finally agreed to listen. We will see what the listening produces. For now it is almost enough that the boat came to port.