Unpaid Migrant Workers Left To Go Hungry in Qatar

[Amnesty International logo. Image from Amnesty International.] [Amnesty International logo. Image from Amnesty International.]

Unpaid Migrant Workers Left To Go Hungry in Qatar

By : Jadaliyya Reports

[This report was originally published as "Qatar: Unpaid migrant construction workers left to go hungry" by Amnesty International on 18 December 2013.]

More than 80 migrant construction workers in Qatar who worked for nearly a year without pay on a prestigious tower in Doha’s financial district are facing serious food shortages and need urgent government assistance, Amnesty International said today.
 
On International Migrants’ Day, the organization is calling on the Qatari authorities to address the plight of the employees of Lee Trading and Contracting (LTC) who were working in conditions that may amount to forced labour.
 
In mid-November Amnesty International’s Secretary General visited the workers’ camp in the al-Sailiya industrial area and subsequently asked the Ministries of Labour and Interior to address the situation at the company as a matter of priority.
 
“It is now one month since we visited these men and found them living in desperate conditions. But their ordeal has not ended,” said Salil Shetty, Secretary General of Amnesty International.
 
“They have not had been paid for nearly a year and can’t even buy food to sustain themselves on a day-to-day basis. They also can’t afford to send money back home to their families or to pay off debts.
 
“The Qatari government must step in now and end this crisis. The men have told us they simply want to collect the unpaid wages they are owed and to leave the country. The Ministries of Labour and Interior must deliver that as soon as possible. Doing so will signal that the government really means what it says about protecting workers’ rights.”
 
Conditions at the camp are grim. Some workers are sleeping on hard wooden boards without mattresses, and some of the temporary accommodation buildings are dangerously unstable; the floors and ceilings in one bedroom are close to collapsing.
 
Unpaid wages

The group, which includes around 60 Nepalese workers as well as migrants from Sri Lanka, the Philippines, Nigeria, China and Bangladesh, are owed up to a year’s worth of salaries. They have been fitting out two floors – 38 and 39 - in Doha’s Al Bidda Tower, which has been dubbed “Qatar`s Home of Football” because a number of football-related organizations have offices there.
 
Amnesty International has seen documentation suggesting that in total LTC owes the workers around 1.5 million riyals (approximately US$412,000). The exact reasons the company did not pay the men remain unclear.
 
The project was completed in October 2013, and since then the workers have been stranded in their camp, without pay and facing severe shortages of food.
 
One Nepalese labourer told researchers: “‘Do the work and we’ll pay you tomorrow’, they said … We kept doing the work and they kept changing the date and we never got paid.”
 
The same man said that his sister had committed suicide in Nepal in mid-2013 because of the financial problems his family were facing. He had not been able to send them any money for many months and was not able to return home for her funeral.
 
The workers have all filed cases against LTC at Doha’s Labour Court to try to reclaim their salaries. But the court has asked them each to pay a fee of 600 riyals (US$165) for an expert report to be commissioned into their case. Unless this is paid, the cases cannot progress.
 
The workers told Amnesty International that the court rejected their request for the fees to be waived because of their financial situation.
 
Under Qatar’s Labour Law, workers are supposed to be exempt from paying judicial fees.
 
“This case illustrates perfectly the massive obstacles migrant workers face to getting justice in Qatar. How can a worker who has not been paid for nearly a year afford such a sum of money?” said Salil Shetty.
 
Allegations of forced labour

Some of the men have alleged that when they stopped work in August 2013, in protest at the lack of salaries, a representative of LTC threatened them with jail. The men said that they returned to work as a result.
 
The company representative in question has strongly denied this allegation to Amnesty International.
 
Under the International Labour Organization’s (ILO) Forced Labour Convention, forcing the men to work under threat of imprisonment would constitute forced labour.
 
Food shortages and other problems for the workers

The LTC employees are not being provided with food or food allowances and have no salaries to buy food. The company had been providing them 250 riyals (US$69) per month as a food allowance but this stopped in October.
 
The workers are now being forced to borrow money to buy food. In mid-November several men complained to Amnesty International of hunger.
 
A representative of LTC told Amnesty International in November that the food allowance had stopped the previous month because, “at the end of the day, I’m not making any money out of this company”.
 
Because of Qatar’s restrictive sponsorship system, the workers are tied to LTC and are not allowed to earn money by working at another company.
 
In late November, Doha residents concerned about the workers’ situation collected donations and sent a delivery of food to provide temporary assistance.
 
“It is shameful to think that in one of the richest countries in the world, migrant workers are being left to go hungry. The Qatari authorities must take action immediately,” said Salil Shetty.
 
The workers also told researchers that the company had not issued them with valid residence permits, which are required under Qatari law, leaving them at risk of arrest.
 
An LTC representative told Amnesty International that the company was unable to pay for permits for the workers.

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Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 


[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412