22/04/2021
Salary Abuses Facing Migrant Workers Ahead of Qatar’s FIFA World Cup 2022 | HRW
service benefits, and they regularly violate their contracts with migrant workers with impunity.
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Summary
In the worst cases, workers told Human Rights Watch that employers simply stopped paying
their wages, and they often struggled to feed themselves. Taking employers and their
companies to the Labour Relations department or the Labour Dispute Resolution Committees
is difficult, costly, time-consuming, ineffective, and can often result in retaliation. Workers
often describe taking legal action as a “Catch-22” situation - indebted if you do, indebted if you
don’t.
The Covid-19 pandemic has amplified the ways in which migrant workers’ rights to wages have
long been violated. While none of the wage-related problems migrant workers are facing under
Covid-19 are novel — delayed wages, unpaid wages, forceful terminations, repatriation without
receiving end-of-service benefits, delayed access to justice regarding wages, arbitrary
deductions from salaries — since the pandemic first appeared in Qatar, these abuses have
appeared more frequently.
While each migrant worker had a unique story, the wage abuses they face reflect a pattern of
abuse driven and facilitated by three key factors: the kafala (sponsorship) system, a migrant
labor governance system in Qatar; deceptive recruitment practices both in Qatar and in
workers’ home countries; and business practices including the so-called ‘pay when paid’ clause,
which requires the subcontractor to delay payments to workers and leaves migrant workers
vulnerable to payment delays in supply chain hierarchies.
Kafala at the Heart of Migrant Worker Abuse
At the heart of enabling wage abuse lies the kafala (sponsorship) system, which ties migrant
workers’ visas to their employers. This leaves workers dependent on their employers for their
legal residency and status in the country, placing them in a position of vulnerability that
employers can, and often do, take advantage of.
In 2017, Qatar committed to abolishing the kafala system.[4] And while it has since introduced
some measures that have served to chip away at kafala, employers are still responsible for
securing, renewing, and cancelling residency permits for migrant workers, and are thus still
able to severely restrict workers’ ability to change jobs. The kafala system grants employers
unchecked powers over migrant workers, allowing them to evade accountability for labor and
human rights abuses, and leaves workers beholden to debt and in constant fear of retaliation.
In Qatar, where workers, especially low-paid laborers and domestic workers, often depend on
the employer not just for their jobs but also for housing and food, and where passport
confiscations, high recruitment fees, and deceptive recruitment practices are ongoing and
https://www.hrw.org/report/2020/08/24/how-can-we-work-without-wages/salary-abuses-facing-migrant-workers-ahead-qatars
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