Cultured pearls: tarnished by exploitation?

(July 2000)

Article published in "Trade Union World" of July 2000, also available on http://www.icftu.org/displaydocument.asp?Index=991211165&Language=EN

Pearl cultivation, a sector unfamiliar to the international trade union movement, represents the livelihood of numerous atolls in the Pacific Ocean. Here is a report from these heavenly islands where often people work very hard and safety standards are neglected (1).

In people’s minds all over the world, French Polynesia evokes dream-like images of beautiful beaches and blue lagoons. But, for the islanders, luxury tourism is not enough to ensure economic growth. The funds transferred from France to compensate for the closing of the Pacific Nuclear Experimentation Centre (PNEC) will be discontinued at the end of 2006 (See Trade Union World of March 2000). So how will Tahitians be able to maintain their current living standards, which are among the highest in the Pacific? Tapping the resources of the sea through fishing and pearl cultivation (2) is considered by many to be the answer, since profitable activities are scarce on these islands lost in the middle of the ocean. Although fishing has not yet been developed on a large scale, Tahiti’s black pearls are already highly appreciated as luxury gems, to the point that their export has become the second source of income for French Polynesia after tourism, and it is thanks to black pearls that one family in four earn their livelihood in the Tuamotu archipelago. The living and working conditions on the pearl farms have not however improved at the same pace as economic prospects.

“Investing in pearl cultivation was the saddest mistake in my life,” confides Joseph Tetua, a small producer on the Rangiroa atoll, who can fortunately rely on the income from his family pension to make ends meet. Ten or 15 years ago, many Polynesians believed that setting up a pearl farm would be the golden goose enabling them to become rich quickly. You buy a few oysters, a bit of equipment, you rent a section of the lagoon, and then you leisurely wait for the harvest – such a prospect of easy gain led many Polynesians to flock back to the Tuamotu archipelago, which they had left in droves in favour of Tahiti at the time when the PNEC was created. The problem is that the pearls can only be harvested two years after the farm is started and, in the meantime, you have to meet the running costs: wages of hired hands and “grafters”, petrol for the outboard engines, regular cleaning of the shells, etc. Before selling your first batch of pearls, you also have to invest in the purchase of young oysters in order to maintain production after the first harvest. All these financial constraints caused the disappearance of quite a few small producers who believed it would be easy to imitate the pearl-cultivation pioneers, some of whom made a fortune.

                                             Bloodstained pearls?

Having said this, in spite of the difficulties involved in launching the farms, pearl cultivation remains the main source of income for thousands of families in Polynesia. Consequently, pearl producers were very concerned a few years ago when headlines appeared in the newspapers denouncing the poor safety conditions in the sector, following a spate of fatal accidents among the divers working on the pearl farms. Is the black pearl bloodstained? This question has its roots in the introduction of scuba-diving equipment. Since time immemorial, Polynesians have been excellent swimmers, capable of diving to considerable depths without any breathing apparatus, but the prospect of increasing productivity on the farms by using compressed air cylinders and other scuba-diving equipment has now displaced the time-honoured diving techniques, which required fewer precautions. In 1987, the Territory’s government (3) adopted a set of regulations concerning diving practices on the pearl farms, but these regulations – more suited to scuba diving as a sport than to professional divers – fail to conform to international standards and were indeed rejected by the ILO in 1996. Since then, France has officially instructed the authorities of the Territory to adopt a new set of standards, but no legislation is as yet in force, even though the social partners seem to have
reached an agreement in this area.

At any rate, the implementation of the existing legislation is also an issue. For the whole of French Polynesia, there are only two factory inspectors and four “controllers”. In principle, the proportion is not too bad for a country with only 50,000 employees in total, but Polynesia is spread over an area as large as Europe. The controls that government inspectors can carry out on the remotest atolls are therefore severely limited by time and budgetary constraints. When they are unable to “get a lift” from naval vessels, inspectors are forced to use the regular shipping lines and airline passenger services to certain islands, where they often have to charter a speedboat to visit the remotest atolls, i.e. those were violations of safety standards are most frequent and most serious.

     “When the factory inspector arrives, I close down until he leaves!”

Another difficulty for inspectors is that, being so few, their names and faces are known to many people, and a “kindly” phone call usually warns producers of their arrival (the call might be made, for example, by an airport employee who has seen the inspector embark). “As far as I’m concerned, when I know they’re on their way to the atoll, I close down my farm until they have left,” explains a small-scale pearl farmer from Manihi (Tuamotu archipelago). Those who stay open can easily cover up the most serious forms of abuse, such as using their own children or other unregistered workers as divers. In spite of these difficulties, factory inspectors regularly discover violations, most often on the smaller farms: lack of diving logs, non-respect of maximum diving times and depths, cylinders and compressors in poor working order, lack of certificates of competence, etc.

The testimony of another small farmer on Manihi epitomises the prevailing mentality in this milieu: “You know, I’ m all alone on my island, and I have no running water or electricity or sanitary facilities. I had to manage all by myself and start from scratch to set up my farm. Therefore, if someone comes here and tries to impose regulations devised by some official or other in France or Papeete, forcing me to incur expenses which will make me go bankrupt, I find it is simply outrageous.”

Lack of proper training among divers is frequently mentioned as the main cause of the fatal accidents that have occurred. Diving courses can only be followed in Papeete; they are held in French and last several weeks. Yet the vast majority of pearl farms are in the Tuamotu archipelago, hundreds of miles from Papeete. The number of islanders sufficiently educated to benefit from these courses is already small and, moreover, in order to be able to follow a course, their employer would have to finance their stay on Tahiti, where accommodation is extremely expensive. Small farmers believe they cannot afford this kind of expense. As a result, a large proportion of qualified divers are from Tahiti. Many refuse to work for long periods of time on the pearl farms, despite being offered attractive salaries. In fact, the pearl farms are mostly located on very remote islands, where life can be very difficult for anyone used to the facilities available on Tahiti. There are no amusements, no television, no running water, no girlfriends, sometimes no electricity, and the islands are often infested with “nonos” (a very aggressive strain of mosquito).

                                       Deadly makeshift

To compensate for the lack of qualified divers, small pearl producers must resort to expedients, i.e. they must either become “divers” themselves or get help from a neighbour who knows how to use the equipment - though he may have only a very rudimentary idea of the time intervals that must be respected. Accidents also take place on the larger pearl farms, which account for between 60 and 70% of production. However, the employer’s direct responsibility for accidents cannot always be established. It seems that a number of tragedies have occurred because of mistakes that can be attributed to the divers, like, for example, consuming alcohol or drugs a short while before diving, or diving too often on their own account (for fishing, sport, nacre farming, etc.) on weekends in addition to their regular work during the week.

Decompression chambers are at the centre of all debates about diving accidents in Polynesia. When an accident takes place underwater (excessive pulmonary pressure or excessive decompression), the only way to save the casualty’s life is to place him or her, within two hours, in a decompression chamber, and, even then, the results of this treatment are not guaranteed. However, in the whole of Polynesia, there is only one such chamber, and it is located in Papeete. This obviously means that when an accident happens in pearl farming, be it on one of the Tuamotus or on the Gambier islands, it is materially impossible to transport the casualty to Tahiti within the specified time. Trade unions and employers alike are pressing the territorial authorities to provide decompression chambers in various parts of Polynesia in order to save a maximum of human lives. Decompression chambers are however extremely expensive infrastructures, given that, in addition to the chamber itself, a team of four doctors, 25 nurses and two engineers are required to work on a watch basis to ensure a round-the-clock service. But, as a matter of fact, there are no hospitals on the Tuamotus, the archipelago where most of the pearl farming industry is concentrated. Is it a realistic proposition to install a decompression chamber in that area, whose population barely totals a few thousands? The recent drop in the number of diving accidents, due primarily to greater awareness of the dangers involved, suggests not. But what will happen when the salutary fear inspired by the spate of fatal accidents in recent years wears out?

                                Chinese grafters are at a premium

Apart from the divers, the problems associated with work on the pearl farms concern the grafters, whose skills and ability are largely responsible for the quality of a pearl harvest. In the early days of pearl farming in Polynesia, grafters were exclusively Japanese and were reluctant to transmit their knowledge to non-Japanese people. The salaries they demanded were exorbitant (up to 13,000 dollars per month for the best), and Polynesian producers consequently started looking for alternative solutions. They found, in China, a large number of grafters - who asked for much lower wages than the Japanese - and employed hundreds
of them. Only the best Japanese grafters are still employed today by the largest pearl farms. The rest of this specialised personnel is basically composed of Chinese grafters, whose rate of success is slightly lower than that of the Japanese... but whose wages rarely exceed 1,400 dollars. “Compared with what they earn in China, this is already a fortune, so it would be foolish to pay them more,” admits Joseph Tetua. Finding a good grafter and paying him as little as possible has become the main concern of many producers.

A pearl-farming school has also been created at Rangiroa (Tuamotu), and about ten Polynesian grafters graduate from it every year - a drop in the ocean compared with the 500 to 600 grafters Polynesia requires to maintain its current levels of production. Many farmers, however, are reluctant to employ Polynesian grafters, because the latter are rather less hard-working than their Asian colleagues. To sit at a table for eight hours a day for several days, performing surgical incisions inside countless oyster shells, is difficult to accept for the average Polynesian. Some farmers also fear that by allowing a young Polynesian to “learn the ropes”, he will become confident enough to set up his own farm, thus becoming a competitor. Like everywhere else, the wish to avoid paying taxes and national insurance contributions leads producers to employ unregistered workers. This is particularly the case on small family-run farms. As we have seen, the latter cannot afford to pay the wages of a professional diver, particularly since they only need divers during certain periods of the year.

The same applies to the “hired hands”. “We work out some sort of arrangement among the people in the village,” is a fairly common admission. Until an accident happens... Although the larger producers find it more difficult to escape the attentions of government inspectors, they are not beyond reproach as far as employing unregistered labour is concerned. The “King of the Tahitian Pearl”, Robert Wan, was recently indicted for indirectly employing over a three-year period, no less than 42 illegal workers, including a high proportion of minors. This activity did not take place on one of his own farms but in a workshop on Tahiti, where the workers manufactured pearl gatherers.

                                                Child labour

The Robert Wan case has again drawn the public’s attention to the issue of minors employed in the pearl industry. The situation in Polynesia is very far from the exploitation of children which is found in some third-world countries, but on the remoter islands it is not uncommon for teenagers to work on small pearl farms. In most cases, these youths are family members who help out their fathers or uncles with manual tasks such as cleaning the shells. Compulsory education, which covers children up to the age of 16, means very little in the remoter atolls, where there are no secondary schools. Thus, for example, according to a local headmaster, of the six children of school-going age on Ahe, not far from the Manihi atoll (Tuamotu), only six actually attend school. The authorities do not know the whereabouts of the others or what they are up to, but it is unlikely that these children stay at home doing nothing. Many parents, who did not receive much schooling themselves, fail to see how a high-school degree might help their children live on an atoll. “At least, if he remains within the family circle, he will learn a trade that will be useful to him in future,” say many Tuamotu inhabitants. At any rate, there are no accurate estimates of the number of minors under 16 working in the pearl industry, partly because many people tend to deny the existence of such under-age workers. Pearl cultivation holds a promise of development for the Polynesian economy. It is high time that the authorities of the Territory put some order in this area, if they do not wish the image of the black pearl to be tarnished by further scandals.

                                                                       Written by Samuel Grumiau

(1) A more detailed report on pearl farming in Polynesia has been prepared by the Universal Alliance of Diamond Workers (UADW). Please contact me through this site if you’d like to receive of copy if this report.

(2) The French term “perliculture” (pearl cultivation), though absent from the dictionary, is the one employed by Polynesians as well as by a large number of institutions to designate oyster farming when its aim is the production of pearls.

(3) French Polynesia is a so-called “Territoire d’outre-mer” (overseas territory) which enjoys increasing autonomy, although the French state has retained its competencies in a number of
key areas (law and order, foreign policy, justice, education, etc.).