2 - The Logistics of Living Labour

Summary

The kafala system in the Persian Gulf

On 4 August 2019, hundreds of workers in Al Shahaniya, Qatar, went on strike to get their overdue wages and to demand the abolition of the kafala sponsorship system that forces workers to obtain permission from their employer if they want to work for another company. Although strikes are illegal in many of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries, and migrants are not allowed to join a union, workers in this region have a long history of informal or unauthorized strikes as well as forms of desertion (Hammer and Adham, 2022). More often than not, protests end with the imprisonment and deportation of migrant workers to the country of origin and the importing of new and possibly less conflictual workforces. Qatar and Kuwait have the worst reputations in terms of treatment of workers, and migrants often prefer to move to Saudi Arabia and the UAE in search of better working and life conditions (Babar, 2021). In 2021, the Guardian estimated, based on government sources, that about 6,500 people died in Qatar for the construction of the infrastructure for the football World Cup of 2022.

Starting in 1960–70s, thanks to the development of oil production and its export, labour migrations to the GCC countries came mainly from neighbouring Arab countries, such as Egypt, Palestine, and Yemen, but they have gradually been replaced by Asian workers and, recently, by migrants from Africa. The substitution of Arabs accelerated after the invasion of Kuwait and the Iraq War, when many Arab migrants (particularly Palestinians and Yemenis) were repatriated or expelled for both political and distrust reasons: if in 1975 Arabs accounted for 72 per cent of migrant workers in the GCC, by 1985 this had decreased to 56 per cent, and dropped to 23 per cent by 2009 (Babar, 2017). Critically, the substitution of Arab with Asian migrants is linked both to lower labour costs for employers and the greater difficulty for Asians to settle in the country permanently. For the local population, Asians represent a smaller demographic, and a smaller cultural and political ‘threat’ than Arab migrants who cannot be easily segregated into specific areas or repatriated.