tell the people in their home village, “I did well!” (PHOTO BY MAMUNUR RASHID/NURPHOTO VIA
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Votes 4.00
Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, November/December 2021, pp. 36-37
The Middle East in the Far East
By John Gee
AT THE BEST OF TIMES, transnational migrant workers in most countries have
minimal rights and protections in the countries where they are employed, and poor
support from their own governments when they have problems abroad or on their
return home. The COVID-19 pandemic made things a lot worse.
The Middle East (in particular, the wealthier states of the Gulf) is a major employer
of migrant workers. U.N. statistics indicate that, before the pandemic, 23 million
migrant workers were employed in the Gulf Cooperation Council states of Bahrain,
Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, and 39 percent were women, most
of whom were employed in domestic service.
As the pandemic spread in 2020, many employers no longer had use for the workers
they’d employed, and some workers, in any case, wanted to be with their families.
Consequently, there was an exodus of workers from the region, but it was far from
smooth. Some workers faced long waits for transport home. In 2021, as demand for
labor in the region has recovered somewhat, many workers in India and Bangladesh
who hoped to work in the Middle East were vaccinated, to comply with new
requirements in destination countries but faced delays in obtaining the necessary
documentation and authorization to allow them to take up jobs. The net outcome for
migrant worker employment in the Middle East is not clear, although it appears that
there has been a fall of around 15 to 20 percent at present.