A Socio-Technical Multifactor Risk Assessment of Work Accidents among Traditional Fishermen in Batam City, Indonesia

Small-scale fisheries should not be treated merely as hazardous informal work. They are socio-technical systems in which human judgement, vessel condition, weather exposure, fishing routines, and economic pressure meet under unstable maritime conditions. Unlike industrial fleets, traditional fishermen in Batam commonly operate small wooden vessels with limited engine capacity, basic fishing gear, and minimal protective equipment. Their daily work involves physical labour, navigation, gear handling, and direct exposure to strong winds, slippery decks, changing tides, and unpredictable sea conditions. In this setting, accidents rarely reflect one isolated hazard. They are more plausibly linked to the accumulation of unsafe routines, environmental exposure, and limited access to safety resources [1-3]. Recent maritime accident studies also show that human and organisational factors remain central contributors across vessel types [4].

Human factors are therefore critical, but they should not be read narrowly as individual negligence. Traditional fishermen often decide for themselves whether to wear protective equipment, check vessels before departure, prepare communication tools, or delay fishing during poor weather [5]. These decisions are shaped by experience, peer norms, time pressure, and the economic cost of not going to sea. Safety behaviour in small-scale fisheries is thus a work-system outcome, not simply a matter of personal compliance. Previous studies have shown that injury experience among fishermen is shaped by personal, situational, and environmental conditions acting together rather than separately [6-9].

Environmental exposure intensifies this vulnerability. Traditional vessels often lack stabilisers, railings, anti-slip surfaces, and standardised emergency equipment. Wet decks, manual gear handling, night fishing, deteriorating weather, and poor access to marine weather information increase the likelihood of falls, struck-by injuries, lacerations, and drowning events [10-13]. Economic constraint further reduces safety capacity. When income depends on catch volume, fuel price, and middlemen pricing, fishermen may postpone vessel maintenance, skip protective equipment, or continue fishing under marginal sea conditions [3, 14, 15]. Recent evidence also indicates that fishers routinely weigh physical danger against economic reward when deciding whether to go to sea [16].

These risks are especially relevant in Indonesia, where small-scale fisheries support many coastal households but remain weakly covered by formal occupational safety systems [17]. For informal fishermen, accident data are fragmented, safety training is limited, and access to insurance or emergency protection is uneven [17-19]. Batam City, located in the Riau Archipelago, represents this problem clearly: traditional fishermen operate in busy inter-island waters, often with small uninsured vessels and limited institutional support in an archipelagic setting [20].

Although fishing hazards have been widely documented [8, 12, 18], fewer studies have integrated behavioural, environmental, and economic factors into a single risk-priority framework. Existing studies often stop at identifying associated factors, without translating them into ranked safety-control priorities [9]. This study addresses that gap by asking which human, environmental, and economic factors are independently associated with reported work accident experience among traditional fishermen in Batam, and how these factors can be converted into feasible control priorities. Its contribution is to approach traditional fishing accidents as events associated with constrained socio-technical safety capacity, rather than as isolated behavioural failures, and to translate field-based accident data into a safety engineering risk-priority framework aligned with risk management principles [21].

3.4 Risk priority interpretation and risk treatment

Table 8. Risk priority and risk-treatment implications

3.5 Human factors as the main risk-control point

Occupational safety behaviour was the most immediate risk-control point in the model, but this result should not be read as a claim that accidents are caused simply by careless fishermen. In small-scale fisheries, decisions to wear PPE, inspect vessels before departure, delay trips during poor weather, or prepare communication tools are shaped by peer norms, time pressure, available resources, and the economic cost of not fishing [8, 24, 25]. Unsafe routines may therefore represent practical adaptations to informal work settings where written procedures are absent and daily decisions depend largely on experience-based judgement [27]. This interpretation is consistent with recent evidence showing that human elements are frequently identified in fishing-vessel accident analyses, particularly in small vessels that resemble the boats used in the study area [8]. Multifactor injury studies also show that individual safety practice cannot be separated from the situational and environmental conditions in which it occurs [4, 9]. Behaviour-based safety intervention should therefore move beyond awareness campaigns. Fishermen need operational tools that fit the size, cost structure, and daily routine of small vessels, including departure checklists, minimum PPE packages, gear inspection routines, and basic emergency communication preparation. The strong adjusted association for safety behaviour (AOR = 18.851) indicates that this domain should be prioritised in administrative controls and PPE programmes, but such interventions will only work if fishermen have the practical resources needed to act safely [28].

3.6 Environmental risk and operational exposure

The work environment remained significantly associated with reported accident experience after adjustment for safety behaviour and income (AOR = 4.203), indicating that physical and operational hazards are not secondary issues in traditional fisheries. Unstable decks, slippery surfaces, manual gear handling, wind and wave exposure, limited on-board safety features, and sudden weather changes create a hazard field in which even a minor unsafe act may be followed by injury. These conditions are typical of small-scale fishing operations in tropical archipelagic waters, where vessels are rarely equipped with engineered fall protection or standardised emergency equipment [29, 30]. Evidence from comparable Southeast Asian fishing contexts also identifies weather conditions, vessel characteristics, and on-board hazards as recurring contributors to occupational injury [12]. In this setting, environmental risk control cannot depend on expensive fleet redesign. More realistic measures include accessible pre-departure weather information, anti-slip deck treatment, minimum buoyancy and communication requirements, routine vessel checks, safer landing points, and standardised fishing gear maintenance. Marine weather governance is particularly important because the way weather information is delivered, trusted, and used can shape the level of exposure fishermen accept before going to sea [13]. These measures do not replace behavioural controls, but they reduce the hazard level within which safety behaviour must operate.

3.7 Economic constraint as a safety capacity factor

Income at or below the Batam salary benchmark was independently associated with a higher likelihood of reported work accident experience (AOR = 4.368), but this result should not be treated as a simple socio-economic association. In traditional fisheries, income is closely related to safety capacity, including the ability to buy PPE, repair vessels, replace damaged gear, pay for communication tools, maintain insurance, and absorb income loss when a trip must be postponed. Evidence from other fishing fleets shows that skippers often weigh physical danger against expected economic return when deciding whether to go to sea [16]. This risk-reward calculation is especially relevant when fishing income is unstable and household livelihood depends on daily catch. The finding is also consistent with studies of small-scale fishing vulnerability and informal work systems, where economic vulnerability can narrow safety margins and make it harder for workers to avoid suboptimal conditions [3, 31, 32]. In Batam’s traditional fisheries, the large share of respondents with income below the benchmark and without insurance indicates that many fishermen have limited room to prioritise safety. Accident prevention strategies that rely only on individual responsibility are therefore unlikely to succeed. Subsidised safety equipment, cooperative procurement, occupational insurance access, and livelihood support are needed to make safer behaviour practically and economically possible.

3.8 Practical implications for safety risk management

The findings support a layered risk-management approach for small-scale fisheries, consistent with the hierarchy of controls and the risk-treatment stage of ISO 31000 [21]. The first layer should target routine behaviour through departure checklists, PPE use, gear inspection, and basic emergency readiness. The second layer should expand safety capacity through subsidised equipment, insurance access, cooperative purchasing, and institutional support. The third layer should reduce environmental exposure through weather-based departure decisions, anti-slip surfaces, minimum vessel safety checks, safer landing infrastructure, and basic communication systems. These layers must work as a connected system because behavioural rules will have little effect if fishermen cannot afford PPE, while improved equipment will not be sufficient if weather information does not reach fishermen in time or is not trusted in daily decision-making. The persistence of high injury rates in fishing and aquaculture across different national settings reinforces the need for risk-treatment strategies grounded in the realities of small-scale fisheries rather than copied from industrial fleet models [18]. For implementation, the results should be translated into routine landing-site briefings, simple safety reminders, task-rest scheduling, and group-based communication through fishermen’s organisations. Workload-oriented safety design can support task and rest arrangements [24]. In archipelagic settings such as Batam, safety planning also needs to consider port access, inter-island movement, and the coordination of equipment and emergency support [20]. Therefore, practical intervention should prioritise low-cost and locally manageable actions, including minimum PPE packages, pre-departure safety checks, shared weather information, emergency contact procedures, and cooperative mechanisms for equipment maintenance, so that the recommendations remain closely aligned with the study’s empirical findings and do not extend beyond the evidence provided by the accident-risk model.

3.9 Limitations

This study has several limitations that should be considered when interpreting the findings. First, the cross-sectional design limits causal interpretation; therefore, the results should be understood as adjusted associations and risk-priority patterns rather than evidence of direct causal effects. Second, work accident experience was self-reported and was not verified through medical records, insurance claims, or administrative accident reports. This may introduce recall bias, particularly for minor incidents that respondents may forget or underreport. Third, the outcome was binary and did not distinguish accident type, severity, recurrence, medical treatment, or workdays lost. This limits the practical meaning of the term work accident and prevents more precise prioritisation by accident severity. Fourth, predictors and outcomes were collected in the same interview, so common-method bias remains possible. Although the study applied procedural safeguards, including rotating construct blocks and using behaviour-anchored response formats, some inflation of associations cannot be fully ruled out [26]. Fifth, the absence of a complete individual-level sampling frame required incidental site-based sampling. As a result, the sample should not be treated as statistically representative of all traditional fishermen in Batam City. Sixth, the study did not include trip-level and vessel-level variables such as fishing frequency, travel distance, vessel size, engine capacity, actual weather conditions, fishing gear type, and time at sea. Future research should use longitudinal or repeated-trip designs, develop more complete fishermen registries, distinguish minor and severe accidents, and integrate vessel-level and trip-level data to refine the socio-technical risk framework proposed in this study.