The World Cup in Qatar has once again spotlighted the realities of migrant workers: stories of death, injury, and dangerous working conditions of those who built the infrastructure for the event have surfaced.
The Guardian pegs the number of migrant workers’ deaths in the past decade since the awarding of the World Cup at 6500. This report brings attention to important issues around the exploitation of migrant workers by public and private employers alike.
The focus on construction workers has, however, rendered invisible in public memory another significant group — migrant domestic workers. Women workers from South and Southeast Asia and Africa constitute almost 17 percent of 41.4 million migrants in Gulf countries, mostly finding work in the domestic work sector. Qatar alone accounts for 1,80,000 of these workers.
International Migrants Day is an opportune moment to call for dismantling the structural issues underlying workers’ exploitation, and highlight pathways to restoring their agency.
The Kafala system is the immigration regime underlying the conditions of forced labour, regulating employment contracts for immigrants in most Gulf countries with the exception of Iraq. The system ties the workers’ employment and immigration status, and freedom of movement to employers, which propagates forced labour and undercuts the agency of workers.
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