By Susan Kneebone
As recent demonstrations in Brazil around the staging of the FIFA 2014 World Soccer Cup show, major sporting events put the spotlight on human rights issues in host countries. In the case of Qatar the preparations to host the FIFA 2022 World Cup are focussing worldwide attention on the plight of migrant workers. It estimated that the country needs an extra 500,000 migrant workers to build stadiums and other infrastructure such as a metro system in the lead up to the World Cup. But a report by the International Trade Union Commission (ITUC) predicts that 4,000 migrant construction workers will die in Qatar before the start of the game.
As for much of the Gulf States region, Qatar is heavily dependent on migrant workers. It has the highest ratio of migrants to citizens in the world, with migrant workers making up approximately 88 per cent of the whole population. The majority of migrant workers come from South and South-East Asian countries: Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and the Philippines. A series of reports has revealed poor working conditions for migrant workers in Qatar particularly in the construction industry and in domestic workplaces and a lack of enforcement of existing protective legal mechanisms.
This situation highlights the global issue of exploitation of low and unskilled temporary migrant workers, also labelled as “foreign workers”. Currently, there are about 232 million migrants globally, of whom it is estimated that 105 million are migrant workers who are displaced by necessity in a labour market which reflects the increasing disparity between rich and poor countries. Unskilled temporary migrant workers are vulnerable because they have no choice but to migrate to work. Such workers are constructed in laws and policies as lacking connection to the host state but rather the responsibility of their home state. They are discriminated in the host state on the basis of their culture and identity, and often regarded as ‘export’ labour at home.
Builders at Work: There are close to one million migrant workers in Qatar, mainly from South Asia. The majority work in construction. Photo by WBUR Boston’s NPR News Station. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 via WBUR Flickr.
The Kafala sponsorship system which operates in Qatar is a symptom of such vulnerability. The Kafala system reduces migrant workers to the status of slaves or indentured property in host country. This system is used to regulate the relationship between employers and migrants, with a work permit linked to a single person, who is often the sponsor. The law provides power and authority to sponsors to prevent migrant workers from changing employers and from the leaving Qatar.
As the Special Rapporteur on the human rights of migrants, François Crépeau summaries:
The kafala system enables unscrupulous employers to exploit employees. Frequent cases of abuse against migrants include the confiscation of passports, refusal to give “no objection” certificates (allowing migrants to change employer) or exit permits and refusal to pay migrants’ plane tickets to return home. Some employers do not extend residence permits for their employees, often because of the fees incurred. This leads to migrants ending up in an irregular situation, with no valid identity card, despite the fact that they are regularly employed. [7]
The recruitment process and charging of excessive fees are other critical issues. Recruitment fees are forbidden by Qatari law, but the reports found that many migrant workers had taken out substantial loans to pay the fees in their home countries and were in long-term debt. Contract substitution is also a huge problem, as the terms of contracts signed in the home countries are often different upon arrival in Qatar, usually with a lower salary and different job description. As migrant workers cannot easily change jobs without the sponsor’s approval and often have recruitment loans to repay, they become highly vulnerable to abuse and less likely to report such violations. In many cases, such practices will amount to human trafficking for labour exploitation or forced labour as the Amnesty International Report, “My Sleep is My Break” explains (pp54-60).
The exploitation of “foreign” migrant workers suggests that we have created a new global form of ‘indentured servitude’ or slavery in which others exercise property-like powers or control over individuals. The irony is that the development of individual rights to free and decent working conditions in the nineteenth century ran parallel to the anti-slavery movement. Qatar 2022 offers an opportunity to Qatar to show the global community the need to recognise collective responsibility for migrant workers in a globalised economy, and to put pressure on states and non-state actors to respect the rights of migrant workers.
Dr Susan Kneebone (PhD, MA (Asian Studies), Dip Ed, LLB), is a Professor in the Faculty of Law, Monash University, Australia. She is the author of many articles and book chapters, including author \ editor of the following: Transnational Crime and Human Rights: Responses to Human Trafficking in the Greater Mekong Subregion (Routledge 2012) (co-authored with Julie Debeljak) ; Migrant Workers Between States: In Search of Exit and Integration Strategies in South East Asia 40 (4) Asian Journal of Social Sciences (2012) ; “Transnational Labour Migrants: Whose Responsibility?” in Fiona Jenkins, Mark Nolan and Kim Rubenstein eds, Allegiance and Identity in a Globalised World (Cambridge University Press, 2014 – in press) Chapter 18. Recent publications include: “ASEAN and the Conceptualisation of Refugee protection” in Abass A. and Ippolito, F., et al eds., Regional Approaches to the Protection of Asylum Seekers: An International Legal Perspective (Ashgate 2014) Chapter 13, pp295-324 ; “The Bali Process and Global Refugee Policy in the Asia-Pacific Region” Special Edition of the Journal of Refugee Studies on Global Refugee Policy, 2014.
Interested in learning more about the issues facing migrant workers? Oxford Journals has created a special World Refugee Day virtual issue with a selection of free articles.
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By Douglas J. Besharov and Karen Baehler
Let’s assume that Nobel economist Paul Krugman and others are right about China’s economy being “in big trouble” and headed for a “nasty slump.” What does this mean for the 150 million current Chinese workers who left their home villages to fill jobs in the new economy’s growth centers? When a rapidly emerging economy built on these internal migrants — aka surplus rural labor — begins to cool, what becomes of the peasants-turned-factory-workers who made the economic miracle possible?
The answer depends largely on public policy choices (past and present). China’s leaders have long understood the destabilizing effects of large-scale labor migration, which is why they institutionalized the modern hukou system of household registration in the 1950s. In post-market reform China, a hukou operates less like an internal passport than it once did, with fewer restrictions on mobility, but all Chinese still must register in the location of their birth, and access to many services is still tied to that location. Although government officials have discussed the issue and adopted minor reforms around the edges of the hukou system for some time, receipt of pensions, health care, unemployment insurance, and other basic social benefits still tends to be highly skewed in the new economy toward areas of rapid economic development and their registrants. Migrant workers and their families are typically stuck at the end of the social protection queue.
Take schooling, for example. Public education is a national entitlement for all Chinese children under age 14, but locally financed. Until recently, children of migrants were included in the budgets of their rural home districts, where they were registered but did not use services; at the same time, they were excluded from the budgets of their actual areas of residence, where they needed services but could not register. Some migrant-receiving urban districts addressed the mismatch by charging fees for migrant children to attend their schools. This practice caused severe material hardship for many migrant families and led others to use substandard schools that catered to migrant children. The Chinese government introduced new policies in 2003 that tied responsibility for education delivery to the receiving jurisdiction rather than the district of origin and forbade the imposition of differential school fees based on household registration status. The policies did not address the financing constraints of the receiving local governments, however, and did not offer fiscal relief for local and municipal jurisdictions faced with large numbers of migrant students. As a result, differences in local-provincial financing arrangements have led to substantial district-by-district differences in educational access and quality for children of migrants.
Alongside widely recognized problems like education financing, novel problems associated with labor migration are sure to emerge if and when the much-anticipated economic downturn occurs. Redundancies will probably hit migrants first. Some laid-off migrants will return to their rural home districts, where social insurance systems tend to be thin. Other laid-off migrants will stay in the cities, placing additional pressure on urban social programs. From the migrants’ perspective, it is not immediately clear which option—stay in the city or return to the countryside—is best. In keeping with the location of economic growth, greater priority has been given to developing social programs in urban areas to replace the old, pre-reform arrangements, which depended heavily on guarantees of lifetime employment and direct provision of social services by state-owned enterprises. But migrant workers have tended to fall through the cracks of these new, post-reform urban social programs. Meanwhile, rural services have only slowly improved, lagging far behind those offered by urban social programs.
From the perspective of the general welfare, public policy needs to strike a delicate balance of incentives for return migration vs. encouraging migrants to stay in cities, while also stimulating domestic consumption nationwide. Return migration, for example, ought to serve the dual goals of taking pressure off urban social systems and transferring skills, knowledge, and human resources to the countryside. Policy might steer return migration toward rural areas that demonstrate better prospects for future job growth. Return migrants also might be encouraged and/or assisted to pursue entrepreneurial opportunities back home. At the same time, urban enterprises will need to recall some of their laid-off workers when economic growth resumes, and that points to the value of providing reasonably generous unemployment benefits for migrants in cities alongside opportunities for up-skilling during periods of slower growth. Expanded public and private spending on pensions, unemployment benefits, health care, child care, and other benefits and services are likely to be used to stimulate domestic consumption and provide a counterweight to what many have referred to as China’s lop-sided, investment-heavy growth model. Making these benefits available everywhere and regardless of hukou could be seen as advancing both economic development and social protection goals.
China, of course, is not the first country to experience enormous economic growth driven by rural to urban migration. In many countries, the result was massive urban poverty and hardship; think of Dickensian London and America’s dangerous 19th and early 20th century slums. So far, China seems to have avoided the worst elements of these costly transitions. But the hukou system has caused hardships of its own—particularly for China’s migrant worker population—in the country’s post-market reform era. With many prominent economists predicting far slower economic growth rates in the future, policymakers must promptly address the issues facing migrant workers and their families. Will China’s leaders be able to cross this river before it floods, or will they be caught in the middle, feeling for the next stone?
Douglas J. Besharov, JD, is the Norman and Florence Brody Professor at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy and a Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council of the United States. Karen Baehler is Scholar in Residence at the School of Public Affairs at American University. They co-edited Chinese Social Policy in a Time of Transition.
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Image credit: New constructed buildings at Shenzen China. © tekinturkdogan via iStockphoto.
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A few weeks ago, I kept hearing about a new picture book illustrated by
Isabelle Arsenault. I had bookmarked her blog many, many years ago but had never read any books illustrated by her when this book jumped out from my library's shelves last week.
As the title implies, the story is about migrants. Specifically, it is about "The Low German-speaking Mennonites from Mexico" (per the jacket). I had never heard of them before, but I think the story works well to create empathy and understanding for any migrant community. The language, by
Maxine Trottier, is so magical and evocative. I could picture no one but Isabelle Arsenault illustrating the words into such poetic images. Where the feelings of the young main character are characterized mostly as animals. It's harmonious, and dreamy, and everything we dream of creating ourselves - a picture book that stays with you.
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Wow.. this looks stunning!! Thanks for posting it Ggina :o)