South Asian migrant workers struggle with wage theft
Nizar Kochery has been fighting for migrant workers’ rights in the courts for decades, but he has never felt so overwhelmed.
As the coronavirus pandemic forced tens of thousands of South Asian migrants to leave the Gulf countries where they worked, the Doha-based lawyer was flooded with calls about unpaid wages and job losses.
“Non-payment of wages or benefits has always plagued migrant workers in Gulf countries,” said Kochery, who specialises in labour law and advises many embassies in Qatar.
“But during Covid, the impact is being felt 100 times more. People left in fear, in a hurry, and most did not have time to collect pending wages or benefits as they boarded special flights to return home. Now they are counting their losses.”
South Asians have for years travelled to wealthy Gulf countries for employment, mostly as domestic workers or in the construction and hospitality sectors.
One migrant worker often supports many relatives and can earn far more than they would make in the same job at home.
But their migrant status makes it much harder for them to seek justice when things go wrong — as they have for large numbers in recent months as the pandemic has closed borders and devastated economies.
Even before the pandemic, unions and lawyers like Kochery say, the system for dealing with such cases was weak.
Now, they say, there is a desperate need for an overhaul to cope with the challenges that come with the largescale return of migrants.
The number of wage-theft cases reported from Gulf countries rose more than three-fold between April and July compared with the same period last year, says the Business and Human Rights Resource Centre.
Bhoomaiah Motapalkula, 38, who worked as an office messenger, had not been paid his full salary since April 2019 when he had to return to India.
Now home, he is talking to lawyers about getting the 25,000 dirhams (US$6,800) he says his employer in Dubai owes him.
“I trusted my employer each time he reassured me about my wages and handed me a little money to meet my needs,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. “I came home with nothing.”
In Bangladesh, returning migrants have lost about 175,000 taka ($2,000) each on average, according to a study by the Refugee and Migratory Movements Research Unit.
Many workers have also lost out on the end-of-service benefits that they typically receive in the Gulf, said Ryszard Cholewinski, a senior migration specialist for Arab states with the International Labour Organization (ILO).
“If you’ve been working in the Gulf for, say, 15 years, that’s a substantial sum.”
S Irudaya Rajan, a professor with the Centre for Development Studies, estimates up to 1 million South Asian migrant workers have headed home since April and expects many more will do so in the coming months.
In 2017 the Gulf region was home to 23 million migrant workers, most of them Asians, according to the ILO.
A petition filed in an Indian court by
Lawyers Beyond Borders said employers were taking advantage of mass repatriation programmes to repatriate workers who had not been paid what they were owed.
The petition is seeking legal remedy from the Indian government, starting with documentation of the claims and grievances of all repatriated Indian migrants.
A court has asked workers to use existing Indian government services, including online complaint portals and legal aid at embassies, to document and follow up their complaints.
But Kochery believes individual workers cannot fight alone. Instead, cases “have to be taken up collectively” because workers have just one year under the labour law to file these cases.
The Qatar government said its Wage Protection System obliges employers to pay all outstanding dues to employees who have left and are unable to return.
Workers can submit complaints electronically on the labour ministry’s website, it said, adding the ministry had resolved 91% of complaints lodged between March and August.
Companies that violate the Wage Protection System face penalties including up to one year in jail, fines up to 10,000 rials ($2,750) in fines, and a ban on issuing new work permits.
Neither Oman nor the United Arab Emirates responded to requests for comment.
The Saudi government said workers can log violations through its online dispute settlement platform or, if that fails, take their case to a labour court.
But it said foreign workers who have left the country must assign a Saudi citizen or resident to follow up on the case on their behalf.
Other Gulf countries also require departed workers to assign power of attorney to a local resident, something unions and labour rights lawyers say is expensive and leaves those unable to do so with no recourse to justice.
Many labour rights campaigners see the current crisis as an opportunity to rework what they say is a system loaded against migrants.
“For years we have been fighting for work contracts to include a clause that gives default power of attorney to embassies to file complaints on the behalf of workers,” Kochery said.
“Now is the time to set things right, use community welfare funds better and protect migrant workers who don’t know how to access grievance redressal mechanisms. Everyone needs to step up to the crisis because thousands of families depend on it.”