22/04/2021 Salary Abuses Facing Migrant Workers Ahead of Qatar’s FIFA World Cup 2022 | HRW The Framework for Enabling Unpaid Wages Summary DONATE NOW A combination of factors in Qatar and other Gulf countries provide for an environment where migrant workers seeking better opportunities suffer wage abuses for months, and sometimes years, of service, often leaving them in far more dire straits than when they initially embarked on their migration journey. They include an exploitative and restrictive labor governance system; the illegal yet far-too-common practice of migrant workers paying exorbitant recruitment fees to secure jobs in countries across the Gulf region; pay-when-paid policies which allow subcontractors to delay payments to workers until they receive payments from contractors, and the lack of migrant workers’ access to effective avenues of redress. Kafala sponsorship system The kafala (sponsorship) system, various iterations of which exist across the region but in particular Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, and Lebanon, grants employers responsibility for, and therefore control over, migrant workers in at least one of five ways: their entry into the country of destination, renewal of their residence permits and work visas, termination of employment, transfer to another employer, and exit from the country of destination.[23] In Qatar, at present, a worker must be sponsored by an employer in order to enter the country and mostly remains tied to that employer throughout their stay. Employers are responsible for renewing and canceling workers’ residence permits and work visas, leaving workers dependent on their employers for their legal residency and status in the country. Employers’ failure to secure residence permits for workers in their employ, despite it being a legal obligation to do so within 90 days of a migrant worker’s arrival, leaves workers under threat of arrest and deportation. While an employer can cancel a migrant worker’s residence permit at any time by initiating repatriation procedures, a worker who leaves his employer without permission can be punished with imprisonment, fines, deportation, and arrest for “absconding.”[24] Human Rights Watch research has shown that the serious and systemic abuse of migrant worker rights in Qatar often stem from the kafala system in conjunction with other harmful practices such as the routine confiscation of worker passports by employers, and the payment of recruitment fees by workers, which keeps them indebted for years. Alongside the prohibition on worker strikes, these factors have contributed to circumstances of forced labor, making it virtually impossible for workers to leave even abusive employers, despite often suffering non-payment of wages, long working hours, dangerous working conditions, and substandard housing conditions. https://www.hrw.org/report/2020/08/24/how-can-we-work-without-wages/salary-abuses-facing-migrant-workers-ahead-qatars 14/62