Cleaners, cooks, childminders and drivers are the main roles of domestic workers in Qatar, a job that is exclusively performed by 173,000 non-Qatari nationals and to a large extent by women migrant workers coming from Asia and Africa. Determined to provide for their families back home, these women arrive in Qatar facing one of the several negative aspects of the kafala system, the high recruitment fees and resulting debts.
Qatar has been, for a few years now, involved in a series of labour reforms affecting migrant workers -including domestic workers-, that have led to exaggerated claims about the effective abolition of the kafala system: a restrictive labour scheme, widespread in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries, that ties migrant workers to their employers, exacerbating the employer-worker power imbalance and preventing migrant workers from reporting abuse or exploitation. The reforms, announced in 2020, abolished the requirement for workers to obtain their employer’s permission to change jobs or leave the country and introduced a minimum wage.
Women domestic workers, who are among the most at-risk and marginalized of all migrant workers, should have been positively impacted by these reforms. However, in practice, the reality is another. For instance, changing jobs is impossible for them, as they work in extreme isolation. In this regard, it is said that factors such as not having access to communication and the lack of days off or permission to leave the household, all hindered the realisation of the mentioned improvement. This often leads to workers abandoning their place of employment, otherwise known as “absconding”, as the only way to cope with unsatisfactory workplaces or the abuse exerted by employers.
Notwithstanding that, more recently, Qatari authorities threatened to backtrack on the reforms by reinstating some of the negative aspects of the kafala system. Particularly, the need for domestic workers to obtain their employer’s permission before being allowed to leave the country. This seems more like a trend if attention is paid to the several other times when the Shura Council, Qatar’s legislative body, “has weighed in with some extremely regressive recommendations” to previous reasonable labour regulations. For example, in 2021, Qatar, by introducing the need for a signed resignation letter, undermined the law that intended to ensure job mobility for migrant workers, and, in 2022, the country passed a nine-month probation period between recruitment agents and employers that made it more difficult for domestic workers to change jobs during this period.
The Shura Council also proposed additional measures endangering domestic workers such as making those understood as “absconded” responsible for the deportation expenses; increasing penalties against runaway domestic workers as well as those providing them shelter and employment; and hampering “absconded” workers’ ability to transfer sponsorship.
This must be considered on top of domestic workers still being excluded from Qatar’s Labour Law, a regulation that provides better protection for workers than the 2017 Domestic Workers Law, which was denounced for lacking implementation and enforcement. In this vein, although the Domestic Workers Law established limits on working hours, mandatory daily breaks, a weekly day off and paid holidays, the truth is that according to a report made by Amnesty International, overwork and lack of rest characterise the realities of migrant domestic workers: the 105 women that Amnesty International was able to interview worked an average of 16 hours a day every day of the week. Furthermore, almost all of them reported that they had their passports confiscated by their employers and some others described not getting paid and being subjected to abusive and degrading treatment and sexual assault. Despite rampant offences, these are met with nothing more than impunity.
It is also important to remember that women domestic workers face discrimination as low-income migrant workers and women, as well as a third form of discrimination: racism and ethnic stereotyping. The latter is particularly true for African women who, according to the UN Special Rapporteur on Racism, may often be “presumed to be sexually available”. In any case, what is relevant to stress is that the intersecting discriminations noted above contribute to the systemic abuse these types of workers endure because of their employers.
As the Head of Economic and Social Justice at Amnesty International asserted, the picture is one “of a system which continues to allow employers to treat domestic workers not as human beings but as possessions”. Qatar, as a state party to the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, must protect all workers. Specifically, Article 7 enshrines everyone’s right to enjoy just and favourable working conditions, including a) fair wages, b) safe and healthy conditions and d) rest, leisure and limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay. The contrary violates Qatar’s international human rights obligations and puts domestic workers in the country at severe risk of abuse. Qatar must do more than faulty reforms to comply with basic human rights standards.