On January 3, 2024, news outlets in India reported that a group of about 70 workers, many of them women, marched to a police station in the Andhra Pradesh province to demand that action be taken against a labor contractor at their workplace, the nearby Choice Canning shrimp factory. Authorities had previously dealt with complaints about the plant. In 2022, for instance, area residents protested the plant’s piles of foul-smelling trash and its wastewater pond that they said was contaminating their drinking water and local farms. The incident was reported in local news and in clips that surfaced on social media.
The workers were alleging that the plant’s labor contractor had stolen their wages and owed a sum of about 215,950 rupees, or $2,600—roughly equivalent to two years of an average worker’s salary—to the group. The workers also demanded that a Choice Canning manager be charged for using abusive language under Indian legislation that seeks to prevent hate crimes against members of underprivileged castes. Many of the workers were members of the Dalit caste, the country’s most disadvantaged group. Local media stated after the incident that Choice Canning had properly paid its labor contractor, who had then withheld the workers’ payment. After being contacted by police, the contractor eventually repaid 135,000 rupees, or about $1,600, to the group.
Choice Canning found itself the focus of attention again this month after a former manager from the company’s plant in Amalapuram, India, blew the whistle and alleged that workers were underpaid, not allowed to leave without permission, and often living in run-down conditions. These claims were further explored in an investigation based on a review of thousands of pages of internal correspondence, invoices, recorded meetings, security footage coupled with the visit to the facility, and interviews with current and former workers. Choice Canning has categorically denied the whistleblower’s claims and said that the company never underpaid workers, prevented them from leaving without permission, or maintained subpar living conditions. The company also said that it took action on pollution complaints as soon as it became aware of them.
The whistleblower, named Joshua Farinella, is an American who after running the plant in Amalapuram, left his job, returned to the U.S. and filed whistleblower complaints to several federal agencies. These written complaints allege a variety of food safety and labor violations, including that the company knowingly and illegally exported shrimp that had tested positive for antibiotics to major American brands in violation of federal law. Choice Canning has also strongly denied that it has ever shipped shrimp containing antibiotics to the U.S.
These allegations come against the backdrop of similar claims made about other plants and companies in the Indian shrimp industry. Recent research by the U.N., industry groups, unions, and labor lawyers indicates wider concerns tied to the treatment of workers across India’s aquaculture industry, which currently supplies almost 40 percent of the shrimp consumed in the U.S. These concerns come against the backdrop of a shift within the global shrimp industry into India and out of Thailand, which was once a powerhouse in processing but has faced growing media attention on labor abuses.
Last year, the International Labor Organization, a U.N. agency, reported that workers in India’s shrimp plants often lacked working toilets, and routinely developed health issues. Another study published last year by Elevate, a firm hired by Lidl, Kroger, and a third unnamed retailer, also described restrictions of freedom of movement, forced overtime, and the widespread sexual harassment and abuse of female migrant workers at plants that were producing shrimp for Lidl, Kroger, and other grocery stores.
.webp)
The Elevate study was based on interviews with workers at 11 different farms and processing plants in India, mostly in Andhra Pradesh province. At some of those plants, security guards monitored the sites constantly, preventing workers from leaving of their own volition. Similar issues were raised by the whistleblower. An internal Choice Canning document, for instance, and a recorded meeting between plant managers seem to describe curfews and a gate pass system to prevent workers from leaving the plant without permission. (Choice Canning said these policies are in place because its factory is in a remote region of Andhra Pradesh with limited transportation to the nearest metro area.)
Abuses in the Indian shrimp industry are broad, according to the Corporate Accountability Lab, a non-profit that investigates corporate abuse of human rights and the environment, “and range from dangerous working conditions to forced labor.” The organization released a report this month for which its researchers visited several shrimp production sites in Andhra Pradesh —not including Choice Canning—and interviewed over 100 workers. One female worker told the Corporate Accountability Lab that she saw two or three women a week collapsing at work, a result of poor nutrition and punishing workloads. A doctor who treated workers said that the handling of frozen shrimp and exposure to chemicals often caused serious skin conditions, including ulcers. “Look at my hands from peeling shrimp, our hands burn and bleed,” one worker said. “I have a fever, body aches and cough…If we don’t take care of ourselves, we'll be too exhausted to work.”
At some of the plants visited by the Corporate Accountability Lab’s researchers, payslips went missing, timesheets were falsified to hide overtime, and workers who had been promised paid leave by recruiters found themselves unpaid on days off. Workers also reported working dozens of hours more per week than was allowed under local laws, which stipulate that overtime must be paid after 8 hours of work in a day and limit working hours during any one week to 48 hours.
.webp)
In the case of Choice Canning, some of these same concerns were raised by the whistleblower and seem to appear in internal company documents. For example, one labor contractor’s invoice tied to the company appears to show that some employees worked 360 days in a single year. Indian law requires, for most settings, at least one day off a week. The whistleblower also said that some staff were paid less than minimum wage. Choice Canning said the labor contractor’s invoice was misinterpreted and all workers are in fact paid above minimum wage.
The number of migrant workers who lived at the plant varied day to day but was often as high as 650, while the plant only had enough bedding to accommodate about 500, according to Farinella. When Farinella spoke to a welfare officer about this problem in a recorded conversation, she said it was difficult to provide enough bed sheets for the migrants because workers were taking them back home to Odisha when they left their positions at the plant. Documents tied to Choice Canning offer a window into other concerns about living conditions at the plant. At one point in the same meeting with Farinella, the welfare manager explained that the plant had also stopped providing sanitary napkins to the workers because people were taking them back home when they left. “They were saying, we need sanitary napkins, so we provided sanitary napkins,” the welfare officer said. “But these people took advantage of that.”
On January 13, 2024, Farinella was added to a WhatsApp group chat of staff members who were responsible for the plant’s kitchen. He was told a worm had been found in the factory’s food. A staff member asked in the group chat what they should serve the workers for breakfast that day, and one of the plant’s human resources managers sent a picture of the worm. Another manager chimed in, saying that while the incident was “not acceptable,” the image had been “zoomed.” In a text to the group chat, Farinella told the staff he wanted the food for an entire workday to be catered and that he would pay for it himself, if necessary. “I want to use that day to have everything removed,” Farinella wrote in the text. “Fully scrubbed, pest control with spray, fogger, bait stations and traps in there.”
Farinella cited other problems. For instance, he said that workers were sometimes not able to go home for long periods, and wages were often paid late. In January 2024, while still working at the plant, he began communicating over WhatsApp with a migrant worker from Odisha. When he asked the worker if she missed home, the worker said yes. Farinella asked if she had ever traveled back home since having started at the plant. She replied that she couldn’t afford the trip. This same worker also told Farinella about delayed payments. On February 10, Farinella wrote to the worker and asked if she had been paid her January wages. “No,” she replied. The following week, on February 18, the worker posted a still image from her dorm room, rows of triple bunk beds behind her.
The Corporate Accountability Lab report describes wider worries about labor abuses at some of the biggest exporters of shrimp in India, including Devi Fisheries and Nekkanti Sea Foods. One married couple that worked for Devi Fisheries told the organization that they were working in the factory to repay a large loan they had received from a recruiter and said many other workers were in the same position. At Nekkanti Sea Foods, the Corporate Accountability Lab reported, such repayment schemes were also commonplace: one manager told investigators that workers were forced to stay in their jobs until the loans to recruiters had been repaid. This type of arrangement, called debt bondage, is the most common form of forced labor worldwide, according to the U.N., and was made illegal in India in 1976.
Under the Tariff Act of 1930, the U.S. banned the import of all goods made “wholly or in part” in any foreign country by forced labor. In March, the European Union’s member states approved a new law that mandates companies that have 1,000 employees or more and a net turnover of at least 450 million Euros to actively ensure their supply chains do not use forced labor. The law is expected to receive its final approval from lawmakers in the European Parliament before elections are held in June 2024.
Audits are supposed to catch and flag abuses and improper conditions to Western importers and retailers, but a supervisor at Nekkanti Sea Foods, who supervises women peeling shrimp, told the Corporate Accountability Lab how easily his plant evaded proper scrutiny: “When officers come for inspection, the company will take migrant workers for a trip outside so that they aren't found by the inspection officials.” The result of these audit failures is that seafood produced with forced labor is flooding markets in the U.S. and Europe.
Between them, Choice Canning, Devi Fisheries, and Nekkanti Sea Foods shipped around 12 percent of all Indian shrimp to the U.S. in 2023. On its website, Nekkanti Sea Foods says its shrimp is sold at major American and European retailers, including Kroger, Aldi, Costco, Walmart, and Safeway, and to Sysco, U.S. Foods, and Darden Restaurants, the owner of the Olive Garden restaurant chain. Choice Canning is a major supplier to the Walmart-owned Sam’s Club and Dollar General in the U.S. Its Tastee Choice brand shrimp is also available on at least 30 military bases across the U.S. Devi Fisheries ships its shrimp products to retailers in Belgium, Canada, Germany, Ireland, and Spain, and in the U.S. its customers include Sam’s Club and Fooddirect.