09/09/2020 South Asian migrant workers seek justice as wage theft worsens under coronavirus - Reuters “Workers that have been affected by the crisis and have lost their employment are leaving without payment of those contractual end of year benefits,” he said. “If you’ve been working in the Gulf for say 15 years, that’s a substantial sum.” SEEKING JUSTICE S. Irudaya Rajan, a professor with the Centre for Development Studies, estimates up to 1 million South Asian migrant workers have headed home since April and expects many more will do so in the coming months as job losses mount. In 2017 the Gulf region was home to 23 million migrant workers, most of them Asians, according to the ILO. A petition filed in an Indian court by Lawyers Beyond Borders, a network of legal experts, said employers were taking advantage of mass repatriation programs to repatriate workers who had not been paid their dues. They sought legal remedy from the Indian government for all workers, asking for the claims and grievances of all repatriated Indian migrants to be documented. India said there were existing mechanisms to help migrants, including online complaint portals and legal aid at embassies, and on Monday the court asked workers to make use of these, calling for proper documentation and follow-up of complaints. But Kochery believes individual workers cannot fight alone. Instead, cases “have to be taken up collectively because workers have just one year to file these cases,” he said, citing labour laws that give workers up to 12 months. The Qatar government said its Wage Protection System obliges employers to pay all outstanding dues to employees who have left and are unable to return during the pandemic.     Workers who have left the country can submit and follow up complaints electronically on the labour ministry’s website, it said in a statement, adding the ministry had resolved 91% of complaints lodged between March and August. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-india-migrants-wages-insight-trfn/south-asian-migrant-workers-seek-justice-as-wage-theft-worsens-under-cor… 3/12