CHENNAI / DHAKA / AMMAN, September 9 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Nizar Kochery has been fighting for the rights of migrants in court for decades, but has never felt so overwhelmed.
As the coronavirus pandemic has forced tens of thousands of migrants from South Asia to leave the Gulf countries where they worked, the Doha-based lawyer has been inundated with appeals over unpaid wages and job losses.
“Non-payment of wages or benefits has affected migrant staff in the Gulf countries,” said Kochery, who specializes in hard work law and advises many embassies in Qatar.
But during COVID, the effect is felt a hundred times more. People left in fear, in a hurry, and at most they had no time to collect pending wages or benefits when they boarded special flights home. Now they are counting their losses.
South Asians have been traveling to richer Gulf countries for years to find employment, primarily as domestic staff or in structure and hospitality.
A migrant painter supports many parents and can earn much more than he would from the same paintings at home.
But their prestige as a migrant makes it much more difficult for them to seek justice when things happen, as they have done for many in recent months when the pandemic has closed borders and devastated economies.
Even before the pandemic, unions and lawyers like Kochery say, the formula for dealing with such cases is lacking.
Now, they say, there is a desperate desire for reform to deal with the demanding situations that accompany the large-scale return of migrants.
The number of reported wage theft cases in the Gulf countries more than tripled between April and July to the same time last year, says the Huguy and Business Rights Resource Center, which advocates for the rights of entrepreneurs. .
Bhoomaiah Motapalkula, 38, who worked as a courier, had not earned his full salary since April 2019, when he had to return to India.
At home today, he talks to lawyers about the AED 25,000 ($ 6,800) he says he owes from his employer in Dubai.
“I trusted my employer each and every time he reassured me about my salary and gave me some cash for myself,” he told the Thomson Reuters FoundationArray. “I came here with nothing. “
In Bangladesh, return migrants lost an average of around 175,000 taka ($ 2,000), according to through the Refugee and Migration Movement Investigation Unit.
The charity, which according to its figures in interviews with around 50 migrants, found that the maximum losses were unpaid wages.
Many employees have also lost the end-of-service benefits they get in the Gulf, said Ryszard Cholewinski, senior migration specialist for the Arab States at the International Labor Organization (ILO).
“Workers who have been affected by the crisis and who have lost their jobs are leaving the payment of those contractual benefits at the end of the year,” he said.
“If it’s been running in the Gulf for, say, 15 years, that’s a really considerable amount. “
S. Irudaya Rajan, a professor at the Center for Development Studies, estimates that up to a million migrants from South Asia have returned home since April and expects many more to do so in the coming months as job losses increase. .
In 2017, the Gulf region is home to 23 million migrant workers, mostly Asian, according to the ILO.
A petition filed in an Indian court through Lawyers Beyond Borders, a network of legal experts, said that employers were taking advantage of mass repatriation systems to repatriate staff who had been paid.
They sought a legal recourse from India for all workers, it is not easy for the claims and complaints of all returning Indian migrants to be documented.
India said there were mechanisms for migrants, adding online complaint portals and legal assistance at embassies, and on Monday the court asked staff to use them, requesting the correct documentation and following up on complaints.
But Kochery believes that individual personnel fight alone. Instead, the instances “must be dealt with jointly because staff only have one year to register those instances,” he said, mentioning hard work legislation that grants staff up to 12 months.
The Qatar government said its Wage Protection System obliges employers to pay all outstanding dues to employees who have left and are unable to return during the pandemic.
Workers who have left the country can file and track court cases electronically at the Labor Ministry, it said in a statement, adding that the ministry had resolved 91% of court cases filed between March and August.
Companies that violate the wage coverage formula face penalties, a month in prison, up to 6,000 QAR ($ 1,648) in fines and a ban on issuing new paint permits.
Neither Oman nor the United Arab Emirates to requests for comment.
The Saudi government has said it can sign the violations through its online dispute resolution platform or, if that fails, take your case to a labor court.
But he said foreign personnel who have left the country will have to nominate a Saudi citizen or resident to pursue the case on their behalf.
In other Gulf countries, it is also not easy for deceased personnel to grant power of attorney to a local resident, making unions and hard work rights advocates costly and preventing those who cannot from seeking justice.
Many hard work rights activists see the existing crisis as an opportunity for what they say is a loaded formula that opposes migrants.
“For years, we have been fighting for labor contracts to come with a clause that provides embassies with a default legal force to register court cases on behalf of workers,” Kochery said.
“Now is the time to fix things, to make greater use of the social assistance budget of the network and of migrant personnel who do not know how to access the complaint mechanisms. We all have to face the crisis because thousands of families count on it. “
This view is shared by Isobel Archer, director of the Gulf Project at the Business and Human Rights Resource Center.
She said corporations deserve to take steps to allow returning staff to record and track claims for unpaid contributions and access documents in their original language.
“Workers have no leverage when the hard work formula itself doesn’t suit their wishes,” he said, adding that corporations don’t want states to interfere to make sure their staff have access to justice.
“We are talking about giant multinationals with the ResourceArray . . . to help migrant personnel with the things to which they are entitled,” he said.
As the chances of repainting are slim, many immigrants desperately need this loss of income.
The World Bank predicts that remittances to South Asia will decline 22% to $ 109 billion in 2020, due to the economic slowdown and falling oil prices.
Motapalkula returned to India in March and is already feeling the rush.
“My savings are exhausted and I have no homework here,” he says.
“I try, but it becomes very difficult for me and my circle of family to survive. I need my salary back, I worked very hard to earn it.
Written via Anuradha Nagaraj @AnuraNagaraj; Edited via Claire Cozens. Please mention the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, which covers the lives of other people around the world who are struggling to live free or just. Visit http://news. trust. org
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