On November 27, the Santiago daily El Mercurio published an article which announced that the changes to the General Law of Fishing and Fish Farming had been given the go ahead, which will allow, amongst other things, the privatization of the sea of all of us Chileans.

 

The newspaper was reporting, believe it or not, that the senators of the Treasury Commission had achieved consensus on an instruction to eliminate, as the cause for termination of a water concession, the reiterated breach of labor laws by companies, a requisite pushed mainly by the socialist Senator Pedro Muñoz in order to win approval of these reforms.

 

In other words, to speed up the approval the reforms which President Bachelet presented in January of this year, which will turn the Fishing Law into a privatization of the sea law so that the bankrupt Norwegian, Spanish and Japanese salmon farming companies can continue to own our “splendid future,” it will also allow the salmon farming companies to keep exploiting the workers, locked in cold rooms for between 12 to 14 hours every day at temperatures of -12º C, always on their feet. 

 

Thus the much crowed about “Aquiculture 2.0” so popular today in the speech of pro-salmon farming politicians seeking reelection, will perpetuate conditions that thanks to state subsidies, worker exploitation and environmental destruction, allowed salmon companies to stay in business for 20 years, without ever demonstrating the ability to survive without the money generously given by every Chilean through CORFO, without the destruction of their local ecosystems and without the inhuman exploitation of their workers.

 

The salmon farming industry took over all the rights of their workers, persecuted unions and union members, discriminated against pregnant women and those with small children, paid miserable salaries that did not allow their workers to have any savings, invented virtual companies to hinder the collective bargaining, used the police to punish their workers during strikes and kept an army of specialists in risk prevention whose role was to convince each worker that the tendinitis affecting them was their parents fault because they were born “faulty”.

 

As stated in the video clip “The Lord of the Flies 3.0” available in Youtube, more than 100 salmon workers have died in salmon farming in Chile in the past 7 years. In Norway, none.

 

This amount of fatalities was the result of the brutal abuses of the workforce tolerated by the corresponding state services competent in labor issues and which could not be stopped because politicians in the so-called "Bancada Salmonera" of Vallespin, Recondo, Horvath and others prevented this from happening in 2006 when they were investigating this “successful” industry for labor relations abuses and pollution.

 

None of these fatalities are a burden in the minds of those who continue defending, with the workers votes, the companies interests or the country’s image so that Chile can enter the OECD and achieves softer credits to keep feeding illusions, just as it was with salmon farming that now needs to take over our southern waters to pay for their excesses.

 

None of the worker rights was respected in any of the 3 southernmost regions of the world, where this fish farming version of the Malinche Curse was taking place. Today, the congressmen living off any other interests different from national sovereignty and workers rights have again condemned the future workers of the intensive fish farming industry either salmon or other species, to continue increasing the statistics of worker violations, worker fatalities and serious or disabling accidents.

 

Only that this time, if the law on privatization of the sea intended by the socialist government is approved as the banks want (the true owners of the salmon industries), the situation of the workers will be worse than before: there are no more unions and the salmon workers federations are just associations of the unemployed. The farm fishing workers of the future will continue to die or be disabled for life after –probably-- reelecting the congressmen which defined their future for them.