(Newswire.net — August 14, 2019) — A migrant worker is someone who leaves home and moves to another country in search of better wages and job prospects. Migrant workers put hundreds and sometimes thousands of miles between themselves and their families. Their motivation to endure this hardship is to be able to transfer money internationally and provide a better quality of life to their loved ones. The life of a migrant is full of sacrifices, of which separation from the family is just one. Here is a glimpse into how hard a migrant worker’s life can sometimes be.
Exploitation
News reports of how migrants are subjected to exploitation are received with alarming regularity, particularly from the GCC countries. One case in point is Saudi Arabia. Migrant workers constitute more than ten million of Saudi’s 33 million-strong population. Most migrants come from Southeast Asia. They work in unskilled jobs as cleaners or drivers, or as laborers in construction, oil or manufacturing. Immigrant workers pay large sums of money to unscrupulous recruitment agencies to get legal work permits. In Saudi and other gulf countries many categories of immigrant workers are governed by an antiquated doctrine known as the kafala system. Under this system immigrant workers’ passports are confiscated on arrival by their employers. Immigrants are not allowed to leave the country or switch jobs. Essentially the resident status of the migrant is bound to the employer. This setup grants the employer absolute control over the immigrant. Unions and collective bargaining are banned, and labor protection is next to nonexistent. The Human Rights Watch (HRW) describes this system as being “akin to near slavery”.
Abuse
Under the kafala system the abuse of immigrant workers manifests in the form of inhuman working hours, hazardous working conditions, underpaid or unpaid wages, unequal treatment, inadequate healthcare and so on. The immigrant worker population in Saudi includes more than half a million women who work predominantly as domestic workers. Each year there are hundreds of reports of violent incidents resulting from continuous physical, mental and sexual abuse. Many of these women flee from their employers to live in temporary shelters with appalling conditions. These horrible living conditions, they claim, are still better than the circumstances in the households of their employers. Legally these women are bound to their employers, and are not allowed to return home to their families. Some women take the extreme measure of attacking their employers, and are beheaded as punishment.
Language issues and safety
Migrant workers moving to a country with a different language face additional challenges. It has been widely documented that language skill is proportional to wage earning capacity. However, language skills influence many vital aspects of employment including safety. In the mining, construction and oil industries poor language competency and inadequate comprehension of safety instructions by immigrant workers routinely results in accidental injuries and deaths numbering in the hundreds each year.
Legal abuse
Accidental death is not the most gruesome outcome for a migrant worker with poor language Amnesty International reports that migrant workers are frequently sentenced to death in unfair court trials which they cannot understand due to their inability to speak the language. They are also not provided interpreters. Hundreds of migrant workers in Saudi are currently on death row for lashing out against their abusive employers. They have no means to legally defend themselves and no way to tell the courts the circumstances under which they acted.
Economic hardship
Exploitation of immigrant workers is not exclusive to the GCC region. A study conducted in Australia as recently as 2016 showed that migrant workers are paid less than half the minimum wage, and often forced to work in poor conditions. According to an official Industrial Relations Publication of the Government of Australia released this year, “Underpayment of migrant workers is a long-standing problem with significant impacts for affected individuals, the labour market and the community.” In another example from Singapore, CNN reported that even in this highly developed nation there is a stark, exploitative wage disparity. Employers pay migrant workers a pittance. This is not illegal because Singapore does not have an official minimum wage policy! Employers also regularly withhold part or all of the workers’ wages on whim.
Wage exploitation of women
Wage exploitation of immigrants has been reported from the US as well. Migrant women workers who come to the US from third world countries face ethnic and racial discrimination in addition to gender bias. Regardless of their skills and abilities, women are usually confined to manual or domestic work. These women are forced to accept wages which are not only lower compared to native born women, but lower even than the wages paid to immigrant men performing similar work.