22/04/2021 Salary Abuses Facing Migrant Workers Ahead of Qatar’s FIFA World Cup 2022 | HRW their countries of origin have found themselves worse off than when they left their own DONATE NOW Summary countries. Too often, migrant workers suffer wage abuses at the hands of their employers, including delayed wages, punitive and illegal wage deductions, and, most debilitating yet all too common, months of unpaid wages for long hours of grueling work. Wage abuse is one of the most significant problems facing migrant workers in Qatar and across the Gulf region.[16] Apart from being forced to work long hours by employers, living in cramped quarters, paying off their debts, and being beholden to their sponsors for their jobs, food, housing, residence permits and visas, many of Qatar’s migrant workers fight a persistent battle against wage abuse. Each of the 93 migrant workers interviewed for this report has, at least once, faced issues such as delayed wages, unpaid overtime, withholding of wages, arbitrary deductions, inaccurate or unpaid wages, or some other form of wage abuse at the hands of employers in Qatar. ‘Yoofi’, a 33-year-old security guard from Ghana, said his employer has been delaying his monthly salary of QR 1,000 ($275) since he began working in Qatar in June 2019.[17] “We have not been paid in 11 months. Every month they say the salary is delayed and so we borrow money from friends, we take credits in the market for groceries. Even then all we can afford to eat is boiled rice. And because of all the borrowing and credit we have no money to send home to our families.”[18] Human Rights Watch also found cases of delayed wages for workers with higher salaries. ‘Alvin,’ a 38-year-old human resources manager at a construction company in Qatar which has been contracted for the civil, water, and masonry work on the external part of a stadium for the FIFA World Cup 2022, reported that his monthly salary of QR4,500 ($1,235) has been delayed for up to four months at least five times in 2018 and 2019.[19] “I am affected because due to the delayed salary I am late in my credit card payments, rent, and children’s school fees. I borrow money from the bank whenever payments are delayed. Even right now my salary is two months delayed. It’s the same story for all the staff on my level and even the laborers. I can’t imagine how the laborers manage, they can’t take loans from the bank the way I can,” said Alvin.[20] In the majority of cases where Human Rights Watch documented wage abuses, two immediate issues that arose were hunger and the lack of money to send home to families. ‘Sanyu’, a security guard with six children depending on him back home in Uganda, “came to Qatar in search of a better life” in September 2019.20F[21] His contract promised he would be paid QR1,200 ($329) a month, but between September 2019 and December 2019, he was only paid for one month of work; for the remaining three months, his employer gave him QR250 ($68) a month in cash as a food allowance. “They think that’s enough money to survive a month in Qatar? It is not. I starve for food, my family back in Kenya starves for food. I am surviving only https://www.hrw.org/report/2020/08/24/how-can-we-work-without-wages/salary-abuses-facing-migrant-workers-ahead-qatars 12/62