21/09/2020 Indian migrant workers in Gulf countries are returning home without months of salary owed to them - The Hindu “We are recording only the reasons for Indians leaving the country. We are neither addressing the workers’ rights violations nor taking any power of attorney,” says a senior Indian Embassy official in Kuwait. Meanwhile, courts in the migrants’ home countries are not running at full strength due to the pandemic, and neither are labour ministries addressing wage theft issues or other grievances that migrant workers may have before repatriating them. Shashi Tharoor, Member of Parliament, has suggested that an escrow fund be set up where the employer deposits wages for six months once the worker’s visa is approved. Such a fund, says Tharoor, can help pay the worker during a crisis such as the present one. Extraordinary measures William Gois, Regional Coordinator of the Migrant Forum in Asia (MFA), a regional network that looks into the rights of migrant workers, says extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures. “There is a need to set up a transitional justice mechanism to address grievances, claims and labour disputes of repatriated workers who have lost their jobs as a result of the pandemic,” he says. “For migrant workers in particular, the pandemic has heightened pre-existing problems of wage theft. Some businesses have taken advantage of the pandemic to unlawfully dismiss and withhold the wages of the migrant workers. Many workers return home emptyhanded, having been coerced into forgoing their wages and benefits, while others continue to work under exploitative conditions and reduced wages for fear of losing their livelihood in this climate of global economic recession,” says Gois. In June, the MFA along with a few other civil society organisations and trade unions called on governments to set up an international claims commission and a compensation fund, and to reform national justice systems to address wage theft. However, says the MFA, even such commissions and funds are no substitutes for fair and functioning justice systems at the national level. And so far, national justice systems have largely failed migrant workers. This failure should no longer be accepted or normalised. The current pandemic provides an opportunity to ensure that such systemic and structural barriers are forever removed, says Mandha Bheem Reddy from the Emigrants Welfare Forum. “I am seeing hundreds of Indian workers returning empty-handed. I know cases of people who lost six months’ salary, and end-of-service benefits when they were repatriated in a hurry. Unfortunately, the Indian mission houses in the Gulf are not recording these worker grievances. And there is no platform to claim the lost wages,” says Reddy . Quoting a World Bank report that says there would be a 20% dip in remittance, Rafeek Ravuther, a migrant rights activist, said this decrease would hit India’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) too. “Remittances contribute to reaching the SDGs in a variety of ways. At the family level, remittances eradicate poverty and hunger, grant access to https://www.thehindu.com/society/indian-migrant-workers-in-gulf-countries-are-returning-home-without-months-of-salary-owed-to-them/article32… 8/10