(Beirut, August 24, 2020) – Qatari authorities’ efforts to
protect migrant workers’ right to accurate and timely wages have largely proven
unsuccessful, Human Rights Watch said in a report and an accompanying video
released today.
Despite a handful of reforms in recent years, withheld and
unpaid salaries, as well as other wage abuses, are persistent and widespread
across at least 60 employers and companies in Qatar.
The 78-page report, “How Can We Work Without Wages?’: Salary
Abuses Facing Migrant Workers Ahead of Qatar’s FIFA World Cup 2022” shows that
employers across Qatar frequently violate workers’ right to wages and that
Qatar has failed to meet its 2017 commitment to the International Labour
Organization (ILO) to protect migrant workers from wage abuses and to abolish
the kafala system, which ties migrant workers’ visas to their employers.
Human Rights Watch found case after case of wage abuse
across various occupations including security guards, servers, baristas,
bouncers, cleaners, management staff, and construction workers.
“Ten years since Qatar won the right to host the Fédération
Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) World Cup 2022, migrant workers
are still facing delayed, unpaid, and deducted wages,” said Michael Page,
deputy Middle East and North Africa director at Human Rights Watch.
“We have heard of workers starving due to delayed wages,
indebted workers toiling in Qatar only to get underpaid wages, and workers
trapped in abusive working conditions due to fear of retaliation.”
Human Rights Watch interviewed more than 93 migrant workers
working for more than 60 companies or employers and reviewed legal documents
and reports for this report.
Qatar has been dependent on 2 million migrant workers,
making up about 95 percent of its total labour force. Many are building or
servicing the stadiums, transportation, hotels, and infrastructure for the
upcoming FIFA World Cup 2022.
While they come to Qatar in hope of stable jobs and incomes,
many are instead met with wage abuses that drive them further into debt and
trap them in these jobs with ineffective mechanisms of redress.
Fifty-nine workers said their wages had been delayed,
withheld, or not paid; 9 workers said they had not been paid because employers
said they didn’t have enough clients; 55 said they weren’t paid for overtime
even though they worked more than 10 hours a day; and 13 said their employers
had replaced their original employment contract with one favoring employers.
Twenty said they didn’t receive mandatory end-of-service
benefits; and 12 said employers made arbitrary deductions from their salaries.
Wage abuses have been further exacerbated since Covid-19. Some
employers used the pandemic as pretext to withhold wages or refuse to pay
outstanding wages to workers who are detained and forcibly repatriated. Some
workers said they could not even afford to buy food. Others said they went into
debt to survive.
A 38-year-old human resources manager at a construction
company in Qatar, which has a contract to work on the external part of a
stadium for the World Cup, said that his monthly salary has been delayed for up
to 4 months at least 5 times in 2018 and 2019.
“I am affected because due to the delayed salary, I am late
in my credit card payments, rent, and children’s school fees,” he said.
“Even right now my salary is two months delayed.… It is the
same story for all the staff on my level and even the laborers. I can’t imagine
how the laborers manage – they can’t take loans from the bank the way I can.”
Human Rights Watch found that the kafala system was one of
the factors facilitating abuse. In 2017, Qatar promised to abolish the kafala
system, and while the introduction of some measures has chipped away at it, the
system still grants employers unchecked power and control over migrant workers.
Wage abuses are also driven by deceptive recruitment
practices both in Qatar and in the workers’ home countries that require them to
pay between about US$700 and $2,600 to secure jobs in Qatar. By the time
workers arrive in Qatar, they are already indebted and trapped in jobs that often
pay less than promised. Human Rights Watch found that 72 of the workers
interviewed had taken loans to pay recruitment fees.
Business practices, including the so-called “pay when paid” clause,
worsen the wage abuse. These practices allow subcontractors that have not been
paid to delay payments to workers.
“Since August 2019, I have been waiting for money,” said a 34-year-old
engineer who went to labour court over 7 months of unpaid wages and who has
been borrowing money from friends in Qatar to send to his family in Nepal. He
first went to court a year ago and is still waiting for his payments:
“I am starving since I don’t even have money for food. How
will I pay back my loans if I don’t get my salary [through the legal process]?
Sometimes I think suicide is my only option.”
Wage abuses are among the most common and most devastating
violations of migrant workers’ rights in Qatar and the Gulf region, where
various iterations of the kafala system exist. To tackle wage abuse, the Qatari
government created the Wage Protection System (WPS) in 2015, Labour Dispute
Resolution Committees in 2017, and the Workers’ Support and Insurance Fund in
2018.
But Human Rights Watch found that the WPS can be better
described as a wage monitoring system with significant gaps in its oversight
capacity. Employers frequently take away workers’ ATM cards, which are supposed
to be used by workers to draw their wages.
Similarly, taking wage abuse cases to the committees can be
difficult, costly, time-consuming, and ineffective, and workers fear
retaliation by employers. And the Workers’ Support and Insurance Fund, meant to
ensure that workers are paid when companies cannot pay, only became operational
earlier this year.
In October 2019, the government announced significant
reforms that would establish a non-discriminatory minimum wage for all migrant
workers in Qatar and allow them to change or leave their jobs without employer
consent.
However, other elements of the system that can leave employers
with some control over their workers appear slated to remain. The reforms were expected
to be rolled out in January 2020.
Human Rights Watch sent the findings of this report along
with queries to Qatar’s Labour Ministry and Interior Ministry, as well as FIFA
and Qatar’s Supreme Committee for Delivery & Legacy. We received
responses from the Supreme Committee, Qatar’s Government Communications Office
(GCO), and FIFA.
In response to a request for comment, FIFA wrote: “FIFA has
a zero-tolerance policy to any form of discrimination and to wage abuse.
Through our work to protect the rights of FIFA World Cup workers in Qatar, FIFA
is aware of the importance of wage protection measures in the country and this
is why FIFA and the other tournament organisers have put in place robust systems
to prevent and mitigate wage abuse on FIFA World Cup sites, as well as
mechanisms for workers to raise potential grievances and practices to provide for
remediation where companies fail to live up to our standards.”
FIFA encouraged workers and nongovernmental organizations who
want to raise concerns with respect to FIFA World Cup sites through the Supreme
Committee’s Workers’ Welfare hotline.
“Qatar has two years left before players kick the first ball
at the FIFA World Cup,” Page said.
“The clock is running out and Qatar needs to show that it
will live up to its promise to abolish the kafala system, improve its salary
monitoring systems, speed up its redress mechanisms, and adopt additional
measures to tackle wage abuse.”