Morecambe Bay is located in Lancashire, England, and is the site of a traditional cockle picking area. But as with many low paid manual labour occupations, it has become difficult to attract locals to work in it anymore. Which creates the conditions under which low paid workers, smuggled in from another country, may be illegally employed.
In 2004, a group of more than 40 Chinese immigrants was hired by David Anthony Eden, Sr. and Jr., who paid them what they knew to be illegally low wages. The immigrants had been smuggled by a Chinese triad. They had little or no English, little or no training for the work they were doing, and, crucially, virtually no swimming skills. More than forty of them were trapped by the incoming tide, and more than twenty of them drowned.
In the resulting trial, several triad members were given lengthy prison sentences, but no one else was.
