Laborers’ rights: opportunities for violations are high
Kuwait ratified 19 ILO conventions, including seven of the eight fundamental conventions
This is the final part of a two-part series of articles on the status of migrant workers in Kuwait during the first third of the year issued in a report by Kuwait Society for Human Rights through the Unit of Monitoring and Following-up Workers Rights’ Issues.
– Editor
On January 22, community and parliamentary backlash took place against the appointment of non-Kuwaitis to foreign missions and consulates of Kuwait, and the Foreign Affairs Committee announced including the Kuwaitization of embassies jobs on their agenda.
On January 23, a woman MP stated that the reason for the uneven employment opportunities for Kuwaitis is “the influx of expats in the state jobs,” noting that the Minister of Social Affairs ended the services of 4 expats.
On January 29, an MP asked the Minister of Health about the promotion of migrant workers during the last three years and asked for a list containing their names.
On January 31, a press release by the Parliamentary Job Replacement and Employment Crisis Committee addressed the educational institutions role in limiting employment and applying the replacement policy.
On February 14, the MP Abdulwahahb Al-Babiteen directed a question to all ministers regarding the appointment of expats as advisers, and asserted that non-Kuwaitis are receiving benefits along with salary such as travel tickets, housing allowance and health insurance.
On February 13, an MP stated, “The expats are such opportunistic bacteria.”
On March 25, a press release by the Parliamentary Job Replacement and Employment Crisis Committee stated that whoever monitors the foreign remittances of expats will definitely demand that the replacement policy be implemented immediately.
On March 30, an MP asked the Minister of Oil and the Minister of Electricity and Water about the nonKuwaiti employees in Kuwait Petroleum Corporation and its companies, and the external tasks assigned to them, and demanded the disclosure of expats employees in the Petroleum Corporation and its affiliates sent to official missions and external training courses for the past three years.
On 24 April, the MP Omar alTabtabai asked the Minister of State for Housing Affairs and Minister of State for Service Affairs, Jenan Bushehri, about the Civil Aviation Technical Bureau contracting with foreign consultants, including the former Lebanese president of Civil Aviation and asked to be provided with the contract, its value and duration. The MP also asked about the salaries of expats, their qualifications and the justification behind recruiting them.
Kuwait has ratified 19 ILO Conventions, including seven of the eight fundamental conventions, which have given priority to international labor standards and are supposedly to guarantee the rights of workers in its domestic laws, but are based primarily on the recruitment of migrant workers under the sponsorship system.
This system links labor visas to those who recruited them, which raises the chances of abuse and exploitation of labor. In addition, it restricts the workers’ freedom and places them under the responsibility of the sponsors, which gives the sponsors the power to control the workers’ life in terms of renewing residence and moving to another work. Such system also gives the sponsors the mechanism of deporting the worker through absconding reports and provides the sponsors with facilitations to be a trader of residencies and a key contributor to the increase of marginal employment.
The migrant labor in Kuwait operates according to a number of laws. The workers of private and oil sectors are subject to Law No. (6) of 2010 on the Work in the Private Sector. This law grants many rights to the workers. During the reporting period, it was noticed that the law contains a number of gaps, such as the fact that it does not criminalize the violation of its clauses, e.g. seizing the passport with the sponsor; compliance with the number of work hours; financial entitlements; end of service benefits and the delay of the worker’s salary for seven days. However, the new amendments addressed these gaps and identified penalties in the same law for violators. Yet, the law still does not contain a clause that grants the worker an annual increase in pay.
As for domestic labor, they are included in the Kuwaiti Domestic Employment Law No. 68 of 2015. This sector tops the list of the highest jobs occupied by migrant workers, according to the statistics of the Public Authority for Civil Information, which quoted the word “servant” when referring to the domestic workers, which is necessarily a word with racist implications related to color and function. The KSHR has called in previous human rights reports to replace the word “servant” with the word “domestic worker”, which the concerned bodies responded to.
The workers in this sector possess a vital and important law that guarantees many of the worker’s rights. However, it is noted that the length of work hours, which is 12 hours as a maximum, contains only hour for rest, but the long hours are not commensurate with the decision of the Ministry of Interior that the salaries of workers in this sector should be 60 dinars (About 200 USD) as a minimum. This is a major burden on the worker and has led to a number of problems, for example, the suspension of Indian domestic workers, and the requirement of the Government of India that the domestic worker’s salary should not be less than 75 dinars (about 250 USD).
Director of Domestic Employment Department at the Ministry of Interior Mohammed Al-Ajmi had complained that the law prevented them from taking any punitive measures in order not to violate the provisions of the law. He also added that they wish to deposit the salaries of workers in this sector with banks, pointing out that the Central Bank and the Union of Banks strongly rejected that.
The KSHR has received many complaints from domestic workers. These complaints were similar in content, complaining about “long work hours without rest; working for long hours without pay; being prevented from annual leaves.” Domestic labor is subjected to many violations, sometimes amounting to slavery, torture, humiliation and rape, which has caused political problems between the Government of Kuwait and the Philippines in addition to a number of countries such as Sri Lanka, India and Ethiopia.
Migrant workers in Kuwait are generally subjected to racist decisions, while receiving a large amount of accusations. Also, speeches of violence have spread over social media and other media outlets, and the responsible for such speeches are mostly members of the National Assembly or government officials.
Meanwhile, workers in Kuwait and their families do not have the right to education in public schools. Kuwait has ratified the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR). Article 40 of the Kuwaiti Constitution, however, guarantees the right to education for Kuwaitis only.
On January 3, the Research and Investigation Department in the General Department of Residency Affairs Investigation of the Ministry of Interior included the names of 46 workers in the most wanted list in preparation for their expulsion from the country. This came after the seizure of 9 fictitious companies and their sponsorships. This is monitored as a human offense because the worker has no fault that the company is fake.
On January 11, a member of the National Assembly proposed imposing fees for the expats driving license amounting to 1000 dinars, and 500 dinars for renewing the license annually. Furthermore, imposing fees on expats who possess more than one car registered in his name starting from 500 dinars at a cumulative rate and preventing renewal of the vehicle registration certificate for the expats if the age of the vehicle registered in his name is more than 10 years.
On February 3, The Legislative and Legal Affairs Committee of the National Assembly proposed a law on taxing foreign remittances for migrant workers.
On February 11, the Kuwaiti Union of Domestic Labor Offices demanded the government for the halt of renewing the Filipino employment residencies along the lines of the problems between the two countries.
On February 20, Major General Fahd al-Shawi, Undersecretary of Traffic Affairs at the Ministry of Interior, stated that a decision will be issued to prevent expatriates from owning more than one car, arguing that some of them have 60 to 70 cars and that one “domestic worker” owns five cars in his name, let alone that some expats have cars in their name but do not have a driving license.
On March 14, an MP called for the withdrawal of jobs occupied by nonKuwaitis in the private sector and granting them to Kuwaitis, either by replacement or direct appointment, including Kuwait’s embassies abroad.
On March 25, bills were discussed, including the imposition of a tax or fees on foreign remittances of expats, in the presence of Finance Minister Nayef Al Hajraf and Governor of the Central Bank Mohammad Al-Hashel, with the aim of adding amounts ranging from 50 to 60 million dinars to the public budget of the State annually.
On March 31, an article published in Al-Anba Kuwaiti newspaper suggests that the Ministry of Interior stop all expats’ driving licenses without exception. The article added that, “They are then re-granted according to the law, and I am sure that half of the licenses granted to expats will become not legible.”
On April 28, oil officials stated that the KPC and its affiliates spent 18.3 million dinars during the fiscal year 2017/2018 for the cost of medical treatment for migrant workers in the oil sector and their families in Ahmadi Hospital, while the cost of treatment of migrants during the last five years in the oil sector amounted to 95 million dinars.
Kuwait and the Philippines: Playing on the Strings of Workers
The reporting period witnessed the emergence of a diplomatic crisis between Kuwait and the Philippines as a result of the Philippines’ laborers situation in Kuwait, domestic workers in particular.
A Filipino domestic worker died in Kuwait and a forensic report from Kuwait stated that the cause of death was “angina pectoris”, yet after her body was sent to the Philippines, a forensic report from the Philippines showed that the cause of death was an assault.
Things have started to escalate, until another issue emerged, a female Filipino body stored in a freezer in a deserted apartment in Kuwait was found, which escalated the crisis between the two countries, especially after the Philippines announced the suspension of sending its nationals to work in Kuwait. The Philippines described the incident as an act of abuse of its citizens in Kuwait and asked Kuwait to do something about the sexual abuse of Filipino workers. The Philippine media published press releases of a group of Filipino workers returning from Kuwait to their country confirming that they were subjected to coercive conditions during their stay and work in Kuwait.
The dispute has reached a critical point, and the Philippine authorities asked the private airlines to evacuate their citizens from Kuwait. The crisis has surfaced and witnessed successive developments and unprecedented diplomatic moves, especially after the Philippines Embassy in Kuwait violated the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations 1961 and freed a number of domestic workers in a clear violation of the role of the Kuwaiti Ministry of the Interior. This led to ordering the Philippines ambassador to leave Kuwait’s territory within a week, being an unacceptable person, and the Philippines summoned the Kuwaiti ambassador to the Philippines for consultation.
For its part, the Philippines declared a “total ban” on the travel of its workers to Kuwait, including those who have obtained work permits and who have not yet left for Kuwait. The previous ban prevented Filipinos from applying for work permits in Kuwait. Since then, the two countries are working on reaching an agreement to protect the rights of Filipino workers in Kuwait.
According to Philippine authorities, 252,000 of its nationals work in Kuwait, most of them in domestic labor, with about 170,000 domestic workers.
Philippine employment has benefited from the decision to resolve the situation. The Philippine Embassy sent from 150 to 200 violation cases for departure on daily basis from the total of 10,000 violators.
The Ambassador of the Philippines to Kuwait stated that his country has sent additional support to the Embassy staff, six consular officers to relieve the pressure on embassy staff and help complete the documents of the residency violators of the Philippine community.(30) The KSHR has some doubts that the additional staff duties exceeded that and were responsible for the smuggling of domestic workers.
The Philippines has 191,000 workers in Kuwait, of whom 94% are economically active. Women account for 81% of the total number of Filipinos, 95% of whom are economically activity. According to nationalities in Kuwait, the Filipinos represent 0.8% of workers in the government sector, and 5% of the nationalities working in the private sector, accounting for 22% of the total domestic workforce.
The Expats Exhausted our Resources
The media, social media, members of the National Assembly and government officials have repeatedly pointed out that increasing the number of migrants necessarily leads to a number of risks and burdens on the state treasury, health and education services, environmental pollution, erosion of public roads and traffic congestion as well as hindering development plans and their responsibility for the spread of unemployment and other countless problems.
Perhaps the most highlighted talks that are being promoted against migrants are that their presence represents a real threat to the Kuwaiti national economy as a result of their “continued depletion” of the state’s resources, either through the benefits they receive along with government salaries such as travel tickets, housing allowance and annual leave or through the external remittances.
These very signals necessarily changed the whole thing from finding solutions to the problems of the country, to the task of “encircling the pockets of immigrants”. A number of decisions have been taken to implement the mission, beginning with reconsidering the issue of joining the family and raising its costs, to removing health support, huge increases in health services that do not depend on the health insurance paid by the resident annually, and then approving the Kuwaitization “nationalization” of the government jobs, laying off the non-governmental employees and finally imposing taxes on the migrant labor remittances.
In the Kuwaiti National Assembly, the deputies’ consultations gave rise to the need to rebalance the demographic composition. At the end of last year, the MP Khalil al-Saleh announced the need to form a temporary parliamentary committee to replace migrant labor with Kuwaitis in the state posts. The replacement and employment committee was then formed to take the first decisions: “Sending official letters to the relevant government agencies to inquire about the career replacement mechanism followed in the ministries and government institutions, as well as the employment of expatriates and how it was done and on the basis of which provisions”.
Many citizens have acquired a racist culture towards migrants. The continuous passive indoctrination through various media platforms and the various media addressing society issues according to the theory of “citizen and expatriate” has communicated to the society in general, especially children in an indirect manner, messages of mobilization towards both parties, whether intentionally or unintentionally, everyone may become in enmity with everyone.
Addressing the issues superficially necessarily presents Kuwait in a bad image abroad, whether through the migrants themselves, who communicate what is happening in the country with their friends around the world, or through publications of local and international media and human rights organizations.
The racist attack on migrant workers affects the future of the country in general, and necessarily impedes the future of Kuwait, which is dictated by the wise leadership of His Highness the Emir Sheikh Sabah AlAhmad Al-Jaber Al-Sabah, who is working to turn Kuwait into a financial and commercial center by 2035. How would this be done while there are taxes imposed on expatriate remittances? How can a country attract a “foreign” investor while imposing taxes on its foreign transfers and accuses it of being one of the reasons for the erosion of roads, traffic congestions and exhausting the state resources?
Recommendations
This Kuwaiti Human Rights Society report recommends that positive steps should continue to protect workers’ rights in Kuwait, reduce racist attacks targeting them and deal with them as a problem. The KSHR also hopes to rationalize speeches against migrant workers aimed at spreading hatred in the society. The KSHR recommends:
1. Cancel the sponsorship system and transfer the sponsorship to the government.
2. Update labor legislation and criminalize its violators.
3. Ensure decent work for laborers, especially domestic labor.
4. Administrative deportation shall be canceled permanently and replaced by judicial deportation.
5. Stop targeting migrants’ pockets and refrain from discrimination in official decisions.
6. Non-discrimination in the right to education and health.
7. Replace the term servant in the official transactions or official websites.
This report was issued by the Migrant Workers Support Project in Kuwait, which is implemented by the KSHR in cooperation with the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC). This project aims to raising awareness and providing legal protection to migrant workers in Kuwait. The Support Project aims to protect migrant workers’ rights and address the violations they face by providing legal support to them, raising their awareness about their rights and motivating the community to advocate for their issues.