In 2019, the International Labour Organisation’s Qatar Project
featured
Food
assessment of WPS. It found a number of shortcomings,
Housing
Illness
including,,
Job mobility
O ce was tasked by the Qatari government to conduct an
A substantial number of enterprises and their employees
are still not registered with WPS; compliance is not
universal.
There are still large numbers of salary complaints lodged
with the government authorites, indicating that WPS is not
succeeding in preventing wage theft.
Due to the workload, the WPS unit prioritises cases and
some cases may take quite long to investigate and
resolve.
Penalties for non-compliance may not be su ciently
dissuassive to employers.
The reporting system does not demand enough
granularity of detail. For instance, only the amounts for
basic salary and “additional payments” are asked for by
Job scam
Kickback
Labour court
Labour relations
Laws & regulations
Lawyers
MC & light duty
MC wages
Media interest
the spreadsheet format and it is impossible to tease
Medical costs
overtime wages, allowances, etc, out from “additional
Medical interaction
payments”.
Thus, WPS can only monitor that some money was paid
Medical treatment
to employees, but not whether it was correctly calculated.
MOM processes
That having been said, the WPS offers a promising platform for
real wage protection. The ILO’s assessment study made a
number of recommendations to strengthen it, including
reconciliation between actual payments and contracts (these
are already led with the government), asking for a more
detailed breakdown of the wage calculation, checking overtime
calculations, getting banks to routinely issue advice slips to
workers showing (with itemised detail) how much was
transferred into their accounts, and reviewing WPS records
before the government awards contracts to bidders for various
state projects.
By contrast, Singapore’s Ministry of Manpower has no
monitoring system at all for wage payments. It did not even
require salaries to be paid electronically until this year.
Placement agents &
fees
Police processes
Politics and policies
Recruitment
Repatriation agents
Salary & deduction
Society &
socialisation
Survey & statistics
TADM
Labour Dispute Settlement Committees
To resolve employment disputes, Qatar set up in 2018 Labour
Dispute Setttlement Committees, each chaired by a Court of
Temporary Job
Scheme
Tra cking