22/04/2021 Salary Abuses Facing Migrant Workers Ahead of Qatar’s FIFA World Cup 2022 | HRW kafala system exist and where construction is often amongst the largest industries. In 2015, DONATE NOW Summary following the United Arab Emirates’ lead in 2009, Qatar installed a Wage Protection System (WPS), meant to ensure migrant workers are paid in a timely and accurate fashion. Today, different versions of the WPS exist in all the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries except Bahrain. Despite the WPS being advertised as an effective mechanism to address wage abuses, workers’ wage violations remain prevalent across the region. In Qatar, the Wage Protection System is indeed a misnomer for a software that, in reality, does little to protect wages, and can be better described as a wage monitoring system with significant gaps in its oversight capacity. At best, the WPS attempts to monitor workers’ salaries and raise red flags when payments are inaccurate or delayed - at times, even these tasks are not effectively performed. In 2018, Qatar established the Labour Dispute Resolution Committees, designed to speed up the litigation process and shorten the time it takes to resolve labor disputes. That same year, it also passed a law establishing the Workers' Support and Insurance Fund, designed to ensure workers receive their unclaimed wages in cases where the Labour Dispute Resolution Committees ruled in their favor and where their company could not or would not pay them. However, according to the findings of this report and a September 2019 Amnesty International report, the Labour Dispute Resolution Committees remain slow, inaccessible, and ineffective. As long as migrant workers continue to lack control over their own immigration status, and are severely restricted in their ability to work with another employer in order to financially support themselves to remain in the country, the right to pursue compensation is futile. Meanwhile, the Workers' Support and Insurance Fund, which is intended to protect workers from the impact of overdue or unpaid wages, was established in 2018 and only became operational earlier this year. Qatar has ratified five of the eight International Labour Organization (ILO) conventions setting out core labor standards, yet Qatar is failing to protect workers’ wages. The ILO has recommended that countries such as Qatar should consider measures to protect wages including prompt payment legislation; banning unofficial ‘pay when paid’ policies; and introducing rapid adjudication, project bank accounts, subcontract payment monitoring systems, and joint liability systems. The abuses Samantha faced in Qatar cannot be undone, but the wages she was cheated of can still be paid to her, and her employer can still be held accountable to prevent him from cheating others. As for Henry, his journey to Qatar is hardly a year old. The Qatari government still has time to hold his employer to account, reinstate his original contract, and pay back his outstanding wages and recruitment fees. https://www.hrw.org/report/2020/08/24/how-can-we-work-without-wages/salary-abuses-facing-migrant-workers-ahead-qatars 6/62