JS
Given the
choice few people would leave their families and friends and migrate
from their homeland. The tens of thousands that pay unscrupulous
‘agents’ and criminal gangs to transport them hundreds or thousands of
miles (often across borders), are compelled to do so to find work and to
earn money to support themselves and their loved ones at home. The
Middle East and North African (MENA) countries are some of the
destinations of choice for both men and women seeking work, women look
for domestic work and child-care, whist employment in the construction
industry, is the goal of the tens thousands of men from South East Asia
living in stifling poverty.
Migrant workers have become the majority
workforce throughout the Arab States; Wealthy countries with weak or
non-existent domestic workers rights, destructive gender attitudes that
suppress and control women and endemic racism. This poisonous cocktail,
rooted in prejudice and ignorance, fuels and justifies exploitation,
including forced labour, physical and sexual abuse and extreme
mistreatment by employers.
The shining modernist cities across the
region are being built by migrant workers, so too the 2022 World Cup
Stadiums in Qatar and they are the main providers of domestic care for
middle and upper class households. The International Labour Organisation
(ILO) estimate there to be 53 million domestic workers worldwide, of
which 84% are women, accounting for “7.5% of women’s wage employment”.
The numbers of domestic workers in the MENA States in comparison to
population totals are staggering, as the ILO state, "labour migration
in this part of the world is unique in terms of its sheer scale and its
exponential growth in recent years". The highest numbers (according to
the International Institute for Humanitarian Law) are in Qatar and the
United Arab Emirates (UAE), where migrant workers comprise around 95 per
cent of workforce. In Lebanon, a country with a population of around
four million, there are roughly 200,000 migrant domestic workers,
according to Human Rights Watch (HRW). In Saudi Arabia the ILO estimate
that 50% of workers are migrants, whilst Kuwait has 660,000, and a
population of around three million. Similar or larger ratios are found
throughout the region.
Migrants to MENA countries mainly come
from Asia – Sri Lanka, Indonesia, the Philippines and India, and to a
lesser degree from east Africa – Ethiopia, Eritrea, Kenya and Somalia.
Countries where huge numbers of people, (often marginalized groups), are
living in extreme poverty, where illiteracy numbers are high, education
poor and opportunities rare. Excluded, ignored people who are the
casualties of a divisive, corrupt worldwide social/economic system,
where economic benefits and power are increasingly concentrated in the
hands of an ever-decreasing number of people, causing social injustice
and extreme hardship for millions throughout the world. With little or
no options such people are at the mercy of criminal gangs who see them
as an object, a commodity to be profited from, and nothing more.
There
are thought to be more people in slavery now than any time in history.
Such are the consequences of a system that breeds greed and separation
and places all value in profit, even over life.
Deceived and trapped into debt and bonded
labour from the start, prospective migrant workers are duped into
leaving their homes for Beirut, Dubai, Kuwait city, Riyadh, Sana’a or
some such perfumed land of comfort. Naïve and desperate young men and
women are promised they will be handsomely paid. That the streets are
paved with dollars, that every apartment has hot and cold running
designer clothes, smart phones and flat screen TV’s and that you too
will live the good life, easily repay your loan to the agent and
crucially help drag your family out of grinding poverty. With hollow
promises like these, migrants (the ILO make clear), are “lured into jobs
that either didn't exist or that were offered under conditions that
were very different from what they were promised in the first place," by
unscrupulous recruitment agents, who are the first rung in a criminal
journey, which for large numbers of migrant workers, leads directly to
purgatory. The reality for many is one of modern day slavery,
imprisonment and violence; mistreatment that in many cases amounts to
human trafficking that leads some, in total despair, to take their own
lives. In Lebanon alone, migrant domestic workers are “dying at a rate
of more than one a week – often by throwing themselves of balconies” The
Guardian 27/04/2013 report. On the scaffolding around the glitzy
building projects for the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, the ‘Pravasi Nepali
Co-ordination Committee (PNCC)’ estimate 1,300 Nepalese construction
workers died last year.
Abuse of migrant workers, who account for
nearly 90 percent of Qatar’s population of 1.9 million, is widespread.
And little has changed to improve matters since being awarded the
much-prized 2022 World Cup. Human Rights Watch (7/02/2013)iv state, that
Qatar “has not delivered on its pledges to improve migrant workers’
rights”. In 2010 the country’s rulers asserted that their successful
World Cup bid, “could inspire positive change and leave a huge legacy
for the region, but the past two years have seen an absence of reform”.
Every year over 100,000 men from Nepal
head to Qatar to work on building projects across the realm, they “are
not experienced at this type of work, which is much more risky than
other jobs.” Appalling conditions and mistreatment by employees and low
pay, lead “some to commit suicide." The Guardian (26/09/2013)v reported.
In fact many recount how their salaries are withheld, or not paid at
all, their passports confiscated to prevent them from leaving and they
are “deprived of the ID cards they need to move around freely without
fear of arrest”.
Bodies of dead Nepalese men are returning
home at a rate of three or four a day, it is a mystery why these fit
young men are dying in such large numbers, especially so, when “the most
common cause of death given on forms is some form of heart failure”. A
probable contributory factor is the appalling working and living
conditions that the men are forced to endure, working 12 hour shifts in
50 degree C temperatures, and often without water. After work “they
return to filthy and overcrowded accommodation in the Sanaya industrial
centre, where the stench of raw sewage is overpowering and workers
allege 600 men share two kitchens. "The kitchens are infested with
mosquitoes, cockroaches and bugs," said KBB, one of the camp's
residents”. No wonder employees, like Ganesh Bishwakarma aged 16 years
old are falling like flies. He died after just two months in Qatar. Too
young to legally migrate, the recruitment agent forged a passport
stating Ganesh was aged 20-year and a job as a cleaner was his. The cost
of this life shifting opportunity including false documents and travel -
an extortionate 150,000 rupees ($1,500), to be re-paid, dead or alive,
with 36% interest. The debt now falls on Ganesh’s family to somehow
service, trapping them into bonded labour as their son was similarly
enslaved.
by Graham Peebles from here
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