Qatar’s growing ambition is hard to miss. From the ubiquitous yellow Qatar Foundation billboards in airports across the world, to Al-Jazeera’s expanding reach, to its emergence as a major sponsor of the arts, to its recent rise on foreign policy issues, the country is making headlines. No wonder the Economist magazine called it in November 2011 a “Pygmy with the punch of a giant.”
One of the country’s crowning achievements was winning the bid to host the 2022 Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) World Cup, one of the world’s largest sporting events. According to some estimates, Qatar will spend US$100 billion over the next few years on infrastructure projects to support the World Cup. Its winning bid included commitments to build nine state-of-the-art stadiums equipped with cooling technology to beat soaring summer temperatures, a new airport, $20 billion worth of new roads, $4 billion for a causeway connecting Qatar to Bahrain, $24 billion for a high-speed rail network, and 55,000 new hotel rooms to accommodate visiting fans.
To succeed in its ambitions, Qatar is relying on a small army of migrant workers—1.2 million workers—who comprise a staggering 94 percent of Qatar’s workforce (the highest percentage of migrants to citizens in the world).1 And Qatar’s World Cup selection means that worker recruitment will reach new heights as the government brings in hundreds of thousands of additional workers to carry out new construction.
And yet, while Qatar adds new workers at staggering speeds, its recruitment and employment system do not offer these migrants basic rights. In 2011, Human Rights Watch (HRW) visited six labor camps in the Doha Industrial Area and in Al-Khor, a town approximately 50 kilometers north of Doha, and interviewed 73 migrant construction workers. Twenty minutes away from Doha’s gleaming new skyline, we found workers who slept in unclean, overcrowded barracks, sometimes with no mattresses or air-conditioning, in a country where summer temperatures routinely exceed 40 degrees Celsius. The vast majority of workers reported that employers confiscated their passports, making it difficult for some to leave the country or return home freely. Many said that their working conditions or salaries differed significantly from what they had agreed to before leaving their home countries. Many also reported having borrowed heavily to pay fees charged by recruiters in their countries of origin and needing to work for months or years in Qatar just to pay off these debts.
These abuses are made possible by an inadequate legal and regulatory framework that grants employers extensive control over workers, leaves workers vulnerable to exploitation during the recruitment process and provides little effective redress.
A Restrictive Sponsorship System
Qatar has one of the most restrictive sponsorship laws in the Gulf region, as workers cannot change jobs without their employer’s permission and all workers must get their sponsoring employer to sign an “exit permit” before they can leave the country.2 While other GCC countries such as Kuwait and Bahrain have amended labor legislation to allow migrant workers to transfer sponsorship to a new employer after a set period of time without having to seek an employer’s consent (in Kuwait, three years, and in Bahrain, one year), in Qatar workers have no right to transfer sponsorship without their employer’s consent regardless of how long they have worked for that employer. The law grants the Interior Ministry authority to temporarily transfer sponsorship when there are lawsuits pending between a sponsor and his employees and the Ministry can grant workers permanent transfer of sponsorship “in the event of abuse by the employer or as required by the public interest.” However, we found that workers have only a remote chance of taking advantage of these provisions. According to data provided by Qatar’s Ministry of Labor, there have been only 89 cases in which a migrant worker has permanently changed sponsors between 2009 and 2011.
In addition, while Qatar’s Sponsorship Law prohibits the confiscation of passports, almost all workers we interviewed reported that their passports had been confiscated by their employers upon arrival. Labor Ministry officials told us that labor inspectors do not monitor passport confiscation, and showed little concern for curbing this widespread practice.
In May 2012, Deputy Labor Minister Hussein al-Mulla announced that Qatar may replace the sponsorship system with contracts between employers and employees, but failed to specify how these contracts would impact the current sponsorship system.3 On October 3rd, Qatar’s cabinet ordered the establishment of a committee that would study the sponsorship rules. But so far, no changes have been made and there is no information about a timetable for abolishing the sponsorship system.
Labor Laws: Inadequate and Often Not Enforced
Qatar’s 2004 Labor Law provides, on its face, some strong protections for workers in the country but also has significant gaps and weaknesses, including no minimum wage, a ban on migrant workers unionizing or engaging in collective bargaining and the complete exclusion of domestic workers.
Workers’ top complaints to us focused on wages, which typically ranged from $8 to $11 for between nine and eleven hours of grueling outdoors work each day. This is typically less than what recruitment agents had promised workers in their home countries, and workers said it did not adequately cover their food costs and recruitment loan fees.
Even with the prevailing low salary levels, many workers reported that their employers arbitrarily deducted from their salaries, while some said that their employers had not paid them for months. Qatar’s Labor Law requires companies to pay workers’ salaries monthly, and the Ministry of Labor told us that the “the Ministry conducts monthly inspections of all companies and institutions and audits their accounts to ensure that workers receive their wages.” Yet, a 2011 study by the Qatar National Human Rights Committee – an official state commission – that surveyed 1,114 migrant workers in the country found that 33.9 percent of workers surveyed said they were not paid on a regular basis.6
Some workers also told us they worked under unhealthy and often dangerous conditions, doing construction work on roofs or high scaffolding without safety ropes, or working in trenches or enclosed pipes where they risked suffocation. The Ministry of Labor informed Human Rights Watch that only six workers had died in work-related accidents during the last three years, and that all deaths had been caused by falls. However, this contrasts sharply with information received from home country embassies, which indicate a much higher death rate. For example, the Nepali embassy reported to local media that of the 191 Nepali workers who died in Qatar in 2010, 19 died as a result of worksite accidents. A further 103 died after suffering cardiac arrest, though workers do not fall into the typical age group at risk of cardiac failure. The Indian embassy reported 98 Indian migrant deaths, including 45 deaths of young, low-income workers due to cardiac arrest in the first half of 2012.7
Living conditions for workers are often abysmal. Qatari regulations on worker accommodation state that no more than four workers should be housed in a room, that space provided for each worker must be at least four square meters, and that employers should not provide “double beds” (bunk beds) for workers.8 However, this is not the case in practice. Most migrant construction workers in Qatar live in what are called “labor camps,” or communal accommodations meant to house large groups of workers. Some companies maintain company camps, while others rent space for their workers in camps owned and maintained by another company. While some workers said they lived in clean rooms with adequate space and good facilities, many lived in cramped and unsanitary conditions. At all six of the labor camps we visited, rooms housed between eight and 18 workers, and some workers reported sleeping in rooms with as many as 25 other people. At one of the labor camps we visited in Doha’s Industrial Area, workers slept on wooden planks, rather than foam mattresses.
Qatar’s laws make it hard on workers to challenge their working conditions by prohibiting them from unionizing or striking. Such restrictions are a clear violation of the core labor right of free association. In May 2012, the Ministry of Labor proposed to set up the country’s first labor union, but the government’s proposal fails to meet minimum requirements for free association by restricting all decision-making positions to Qatari citizens.9 In September 2012, international trade unions – the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) and the Building and Woodworkers’ International (BWI), which claim to represent 175 million workers in 153 countries – filed a complaint to the International Labour Organization (ILO) that Qatar’s refusal to allow migrant workers to freely unionize violates international standards and is responsible for the country’s high rate of workplace deaths. The international trade unions threatened to launch a global boycott of the 2022 World Cup if Qatar fails to comply with internationally recognized labor standards.
An Abusive Recruitment System
Migrant workers obtain jobs in Qatar through two main routes. Some workers approach recruitment agencies in their home countries, which work either with Qatar-based recruitment agencies or contract directly with employers in Qatar to provide requested manpower. Other workers find jobs through personal contacts in Qatar whose employer has asked them to recruit others for jobs.
Qatari law prohibits employers and manpower agents from charging recruitment fees, yet 69 of the 73 workers interviewed by HRW had paid recruitment fees of between $726 and $3,651, usually after borrowing the money from private moneylenders at prohibitive interest rates. To pay for these fees, many workers told us that they mortgaged their homes or sold off family property, and thus faced tremendous pressure to stay in their jobs regardless of the conditions.
The Qatari government pins responsibility for the problem of workers’ recruitment fees almost exclusively upon agencies abroad and protection gaps in labor-sending countries. However, a recent World Bank study indicates that, in some cases, the fees paid outside of Qatar appear to go to Qatari agencies in the end. A 2011 World Bank study on migration from Nepal to Qatar estimated that 43 percent of the fees workers paid to recruitment agencies in Nepal actually went to middlemen or recruitment agencies in Qatar, compared to the 12 percent that went to Nepali agents.
Inadequate Monitoring and Redress Mechanisms
Critical elements of any protection scheme include effective monitoring of employers, work sites, and labor camps, as well as accessible mechanisms for timely redress. But Qatar’s current system of labor inspection and complaints reporting fails to provide effective protection against abuse and exploitation in the construction industry.
Qatar’s current system for protecting workers relies heavily upon individual workers to present complaints of abuse or violation. However, many workers told us that they remained reluctant to bring complaints to the Labor Complaints Department because they expected that once they did so, their sponsor would terminate the employment relationship and they would no longer be able to work in Qatar. With no alternate source of income and no place to live should they complain, many workers tolerate exploitation and abuse rather than face the alternative. A June 2011 study from Qatar’s National Human Rights Committee found that “in most cases, if not all, the workers usually do not submit any complaints to the concerned authorities (police, the Department of Labor, the National Commission for Human Rights…etc.) for fear of losing their jobs or expulsion or deportation from the Country.”
Qatar’s labor ministry has taken positive steps to inform migrant workers of their rights by publishing an informational booklet for migrant workers, and requesting local embassies’ assistance in translating the information into workers’ native languages. Labor ministry officials informed us that they have conducted “know your rights” seminars for workers, and conducted outreach through local media. However, more efforts could be done to facilitate complaint mechanisms. At present, both the Labor Ministry hotline and the Labor Complaints Department provide services only in Arabic, a language rarely spoken by workers who migrate to Qatar for low-wage jobs in the construction sector. In addition, Qatar’s labor inspections unit employs only 150 labor inspectors to monitor compliance with Qatar’s Labor Law and accompanying regulations. The head of the Labor Ministry’s Legal Affairs Unit told us that inspectors speak Arabic and sometimes English, but none speak languages commonly spoken by migrant workers in the country and that inspections do not include interviews with workers. The obvious consequence is a disconnect between the Labor Ministry’s information and the realities of life for many workers.
A Way Forward
The real challenge for Qatar is not going to be whether it succeeds in building beautiful stadiums or enough hotel rooms. The real test is whether it will succeed in doing so without trampling on the rights of hundreds of thousands of workers. The local organizing committee for the tournament, the Supreme Committee for Qatar 2022 (the “2022 Committee”), as well as the company it appointed to help it oversee World Cup construction, CH2M HILL, have said they will establish labor standards that builders and other contractors hired to build World Cup venues must meet. The 2022 Committee’s Secretary General Hassan al-Thawadi, during a January 2012 address at Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar, stated that, “there are labor issues here in the country, but Qatar is committed to reform. We will require that contractors impose a clause to ensure that international labor standards are met.” These broad commitments are a beginning but additional steps are needed. Qatar should require private contractors involved in World Cup-related construction to set minimum labor standards in line with Qatari law and international labor standards. Any minimum standards that Qatar sets and enforces for contractors should strictly prohibit the confiscation of workers’ passports and require that contractors take all possible steps to ensure that workers do not pay recruiting fees or reimburse workers who do pay them. Qatar should also engage independent labor monitors to publicly report on contractors’ compliance with the laws and ensure that contractors who violate them face material and prohibitive sanctions. But if Qatar really wants to be a trailblazer, it should be the first country in the region to abolish the sponsorship system.