Abstract:
This paper commences with a case-study of a successful campaign for legislation to extend New Zealand employment protections to foreign-owned (Korean) charter vessels, employing mainly Indonesian crews, fishing in New Zealand waters on contract to New Zealand firms. The second half of the paper analyses the reasons for this success. It shows that a particular set of circumstances – the egregious nature of the exploitation of the crews, the popular outcry against their conditions, the campaigns that were launched against those conditions, the locational dimensions of fish stocks, and the nature of the global value chain (GVC) in which the contracting takes place – combined to pressure an otherwise unsympathetic government into action. The paper concludes with a discussion of the lessons of this case for other attempts to extend employment regulation into GVCs.
