Ever since Qatar won the bid to host the 2022 World Cup finals seven years ago, both FIFA
and the tiny, gas-rich Persian Gulf state has been mired in accusations of alleged corruption
and, more seriously, the poor treatment of the migrant workers who are building the country's
stadiums and infrastructure.
One word in particular has entered into the public's lexicon: Kafala.
Kafala means “sponsorship” in Arabic, and is a system used in all Persian Gulf states,
including the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, to control and manage their huge migrant
populations who build these countries' infrastructure.
Over 90 per cent of Qatar's population are migrant workers, mainly from Pakistan, India
and Bangladesh.
But that percentage is similar in all Gulf state.
They work for low wages, in high heat and often live in sprawling labour camps away
from the big cities.
Essentially, kafala means that an employer is solely responsible for that worker's visa
and well being.
The system is popular amongst the citizens of the Gulf, as it keeps tight control over
the population even as they are in the minority.
But this system has resulted in widespread abuse across the Middle East, ranging from
movement restrictions and non-payment of wages to appalling accommodation; from arrests,
alleged torture and deportation for demanding better conditions, to suicide and even early
sudden death from working long hours in unimaginable heat.
Human rights organisations have for years decried this system.
Human Rights Watch has called kafala a form of “indentured servitude”.
Yet it was Qatar's winning World Cup bid – which it had hoped would put the country on the
map – that had a rather unintended effect.
It also put kafala on the map and exposed a system that had affected millions of workers.
But few know how kafala works.
In many cases, the exploitation doesn't begin in the Middle East.
It begins at home, as a long chain of governments, companies and individuals exploit some of
the poorest people in the world.
So, how does kafala work?
Take Bangladesh, one of the largest exporters of workers.
In fact, remittances – wages sent home from abroad – make up as much as 10 per cent
of the country's GDP.
In villages far outside of sprawling cities like Dhaka, there are few opportunities for
work outside of subsistence farming.
Agents are sent out to the villages to find workers, often poor and illiterate, offering
opportunities to make relative large sums of money in the Middle East.
The agents have already secured visas from Middle East countries, which have been raised
and approved by companies and government departments back in the UAE, Saudi or Qatar.
The visa comes at a price, money that they do not have.
So they will borrow money against the family's land to pay the agent, the going rate for
a Qatari visa being around £3,500, a huge sum in Bangladesh where per capita income
is just £1000.
Bribes would usually have to be paid all along the line in Bangladesh, from getting a passport
to sorting out the paperwork.
Once they have arrived in the Middle East a myriad of problems presents themselves.
One of the biggest is low pay, often far lower than the contract they had signed back home.
Some workers can be paid as little as £200 a month, making it virtually impossible to
send any money home.
The worker is also trapped because if he or she returns home, they will have to repay
the loan they took on their family's land.
Without the money, the family is homeless, so the worker stays, unable to send much money
home, and unable to leave to find a better solution.
Kafala means that workers cannot change job without their employer's permission.
In the case of Saudi Arabia and Qatar, they cannot even leave the country without their
employer's say so.
So, millions of workers toil for a pittance, in extreme heat.
Even if they could afford it, they are exiled from living in the cities and herded into
migrant labour camps with often awful sanitary conditions, living from eight to sixteen people
in a room.
Worse, your wages and conditions are often judged by you country of origin and how hard
your embassy is willing to stand up for you.
As remittances are so important to the Bangladeshi government, workers complain that they are
paid the lowest wages and given the harshest treatment.
Their embassy is unlikely to rock the boat.
As Dr Chowdhury Abar, director of the refugee and migratory movements research unit at the
University of Dhaka explains, the Bangladeshi government “does not stand up for the migrants
with as much strength and support as they should ... We are fearful as a country if
we speak too much about rights and good treatment of migrant workers we would lose the labour
market.”
No one is even sure how many workers have died, or how they have died.
Few statistics on worker deaths in the UAE, Qatar and Saudi exist.
It is in that context that the 2022 World Cup was being built.
Initially, the plight of workers building stadiums and infrastructure in Qatar had received
minimal coverage.
But international reporting and persistent reports from human rights organisation brought
the issue to the fore.
Qatar made limited reforms to the system but FIFA came under withering criticism for allowing
the exploitation to take place in the first place.
In a 2016 report from Amnesty International Secretary General Salil Shetty wrote that:
“The abuse of migrant workers is a stain on the conscience of world football.
For players and fans, a World Cup stadium is a place of dreams.
For some of the workers who spoke to us, it can feel like a living nightmare.”
The bad publicity forced both FIFA and Qatar to start addressing the issue.
A “Workers Charter” was instituted as was a system of electronic wages to end late
and under payments.
But changes had been promised before and not been implemented and at times it felt like
true reform was being given lip service.
And then the cause of workers' rights in the Gulf got an boost from an unlikely source.
A political and economic boycott between Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain and Egypt against
Qatar has prompted a new wave of worker reforms.
Qatar announced that Kafala was, effectively, to be abolished including the need to ask
your employer for an exit visa.
Contracts would have to be lodged with a central committee so that workers will get the same
wages they were promised back home.
And, most significantly, a minimum wage would exist to end the practice of different wages
for different countries even for the same jobs, which had been criticised for being
racist.
This would mark a significant shift and would see far better protection for workers than
the United Arab Emirates, which has largely ignored calls to bring in genuine reform.
Although there would still be restrictions on workers, so it isn't quite the full repeal
of kafala that has been promised.
Still, both the International Trade Union Confederation and the recent World Report
by Human Rights Watch, two organisations that have been sharply critical of Qatar, hailed
the move as a positive step.
Millions of workers continue to pour into the Middle East, escaping grinding poverty
and hoping for a better life.
But, a word of caution.
Promises have been made before.
Often laws have been passed but there has been little implementation on the ground,
making any legal changes largely irrelevant.
Human Rights Watch wrote that “These measures would be pathbreaking for Gulf countries where
migrants make up most of the labor force, but the announcement gives little detail on
how laws will be amended, how the changes will be carried out, or the timeframe for
their implementation.”
As Nicholas McGeehan, a human rights advocate who has been one of the most visible champions
for better worker rights across the Gulf, tweeted after the announcement was made:
@ HRW take an optimistic view of the human rights situation in #Qatar in their World
Report.
It's ok to be optimistic, and I hope they're right.
I'm skeptical and I hope I'm wrong.