22/04/2021 Salary Abuses Facing Migrant Workers Ahead of Qatar’s FIFA World Cup 2022 | HRW Summary Of the 93 workers interviewed for DONATE this NOW report, 77 workers told Human Rights Watch that they are in debt from paying recruitment fees to agents in their home countries. These workers reported paying fees ranging from $693 to $2,613, such fees vary depending on nationality, with Bangladeshis typically bearing the biggest burden, and workers from the Philippines paying the lowest amounts.[29] Qatar is not the only country where migrant workers face recruitment fees. Other reports have documented a comparable range of recruitment fees that workers pay to work across the Gulf from $400 to Photograph from a strike regarding delayed wages in Doha, $5,200.[30] Migrant workers told Qatar. Migrant workers are banned under Qatari law from Human Rights Watch that they sold joining unions and participating in strikes and so workers risk valuable assets, mortgaged family arrest in order to protest against wage abuses. © 2020 Private homes, or borrowed large amounts of money from private moneylenders at exorbitant interest rates to cover the recruitment fees. But the jobs they get are commonly different from, and pay less than, the ones they are promised. The Qatari government is aware of the debts migrant workers incur on the road to Qatar and have forbidden companies from levying recruitment costs on workers.[31] However, the law does not require employers to reimburse employment-related recruiting fees that workers have incurred and does not address the problem of Qatari employers or recruiters who work with foreign agents to charge workers fees in their home countries.[32] In 2012, the Qatari government had stated that the issue of recruitment fees, while grave, is not a Qatari problem where there are procedures against such agencies.[33] The problem, they claim, is for workers’ countries of origin to address.[34] Since then, Qatar has signed 40 bilateral labor agreements and 19 Memoranda of Understanding with countries of origin to protect migrants from paying exorbitant recruitment fees. The profits are not limited to sending countries: Qatar greatly benefits when workers are forced to pay their own recruitment fees. For example, a 2011 World Bank study on migration from Nepal to Qatar estimated that recruitment agents in Qatar receive between US$17 million and $34 million in commissions from Nepal each year.[35] Qatar has an obligation to prohibit recruitment agencies that are operating in the country from charging fees and to actively prevent Qatari https://www.hrw.org/report/2020/08/24/how-can-we-work-without-wages/salary-abuses-facing-migrant-workers-ahead-qatars 16/62