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CHENNAI / DHAKA / AMMAN – Nizar Kochery has been fighting for the rights of migrants in court for decades, but he has never been so overwhelmed.
While the coronavirus pandemic forced tens of thousands of South Asian migrants to leave the Gulf countries where they worked, the Doha-based lawyer was inundated with calls about unpaid wages and job losses.
“Non-payment of wages or benefits has tormented migrant staff in Gulf countries,” said Kochery, who specializes in labor law and advises many embassies in Qatar.
“But during COVID, the effect feels a hundred times more. People left in fear, in a hurry, and at most did not have time to collect wages or benefits on hold when they boarded special flights home. Now they’re counting their losses.
South Asians have been traveling for years to the richest countries in the Gulf to look for work, mainly as domestic staff or in the structure and hotel sectors.
A migrant painter keeps many parents and can earn much more than he would earn with the same paintings at home.
But because of their status as migrants, it is much harder for them to seek justice when things happen, as many have done in recent months, as the pandemic has closed borders and devastated economies.
Even before the pandemic, unions and lawyers like Kochery say, the formula for dealing with these cases is lacking.
Now, they say, there is an urgent need for reform to deal with the demanding situations that come with the large-scale return of migrants.
The number of reported cases of wage theft in Gulf countries more than tripled between April and July at the same time last year, according to the Business Resources and Human Rights Centre, which defends human rights in business.
Bhoomaiah Motapalkula, 38, who worked as a courier, had not earned his full salary since April 2019, when he had to return to India.
Now at home, he talks about getting the 25,000 dirhams from the United Arab Emirates ($6,800) that his employer owes him in Dubai.
“I trusted my employer every time I calmed down on my salary and gave me some cash for myself,” he said. “I came here with nothing. “
In Bangladesh, returning migrants lost an average of 175,000 taka ($ 2,000), according to the Research Unit for Refugee and Migrant Movements.
The charity, which its figures in interviews with about 50 migrants, found that the maximum loss was unpaid wages.
Many employees have also lost the end-of-service benefits they get in the Gulf, said Ryszard Cholewinski, senior migration specialist for arab states of the International Labour Organization (ILO).
“Workers who have been affected by the crisis and who have lost their jobs are leaving the payment of those end-of-year contractual benefits,” he said.
“If it’s been running in the Gulf for, say, 15 years, it’s a really considerable amount of money. “
S. Irudaya Rajan, a professor at the Center for Development Studies, estimates that up to 1 million South Asian migrants 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 Asians, according to the ILO.
A petition filed in an Indian court through Lawyers Beyond Borders, a network of legal experts, said employers were taking advantage of mass repatriation systems to repatriate staff who had received a payment.
They called for all workers to legally turn to Indians, and requested that the claims and complaints of all repatriated Indian migrants 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 tracking complaints.
But Kochery believes individual staff can’t fight alone. Instead, the instances “should be treated together because staff only have one year to register those instances,” he said, and mentioned the hard-working legislation he gives staff for up to 12 months.
The Qatari government has stated that its wage coverage formula requires employers to pay all unpaid fees to workers who have left and cannot return to the pandemic.
Workers who have left the country can file and trace court cases electronically on the Ministry of Labour’s website, he said in a statement, adding that the ministry had resolved 91% of the court cases filed between March and August.
Companies that violate the wage coverage formula face penalties, adding one month in prison, up to 6,000 Qatari rials ($1648) in fines and a ban on issuing new paint permits, he said.
On Wednesday, sentences rose to fines of up to QAR 10,000 and up to one year in prison.
Neither Oman nor the United Arab Emirates to requests for comment.
The Saudi government has said it can record violations through its online dispute resolution platform or, if they fail, take your case to a labor court.
But he said foreign personnel who have left the country will have to appoint a Saudi citizen or resident to join the case on his behalf.
Other Gulf countries also require deceased personnel to give legal force to a local resident, which unions and labor rights lawyers are costly and prevents those who cannot do so from seeking justice.
Many workers’ rights activists see the existing crisis as an opportunity for what they say is a formula laden with opposition to migrants.
“For years, we have fought for employment contracts to include a clause that gives embassies a default legal power to file court cases on behalf of workers,” Kochery said.
“The time has come to reverse things, make greater use of the network’s social assistance budget and migrant staff who do not know how to access judicial mechanisms. Everyone has to deal with the crisis because thousands of families are counting on it. “
This view is shared through Isobel Archer, Project Manager for the Gulf of Business
He said corporations deserve to take steps to allow returnees to register and track claims for unpaid contributions and access documents in their home language.
“Workers have no influence when the labor formula itself is not compatible with purpose,” he said, adding that corporations don’t want states to interfere to make sure their staff have access to justice.
“We are talking about large resource-based multinationals . . . to help migrant staff in the things they are entitled to,” he said.
With a low chance of returning to work, many migrants desperately want that lost income.
The World Bank expects remittances to South Asia to fall by 22% to $109 billion by 2020, go through the economic recession, and lower oil prices.
Motapalkula returned to India in March and is already feeling the rush.
“I’m running out of savings and I have no homework here,” he says.
“I try, but it becomes very difficult for me and my circle of relatives to survive. I’ve worked too hard to earn it.
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