Death of migrant workers

Labor migration is an unstoppable facet of this globalizing world. According to International Labor Organization (ILO), as of 2014, globally, there were 232 million people working outside their home country. Around 3.5 million Nepalis, or nearly 13 percent of the population, work abroad; and one of every two households in Nepal benefit from remittance.

This money has contributed in reducing the proportion of Nepalis living in absolute poverty from around 50 percent in 1990 to less than 25 percent today. With 36 percent youth unemployment the country would have struggled to adjust the two million youths who enter the job market every year. Migrating for work, as such, has acted as a safety valve; had all these youths stayed back, and been idle, there could have been all kinds of undesirable consequences. Young and restless youth, as we have seen in the Arab world, are enthusiastic recruits for jihadists. But despite its indispensability in the global village, labor migration has seldom been a neat arrangement between labor-rich and labor-deficient countries. As Nepal is painfully finding out, there is a dark underbelly to it.

Among the 109 countries Nepal has opened for labor migration, most Nepalis opt for Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, South Korea and Qatar (in that order). Since the awarding of the 2022 football World Cup to Qatar in 2010, there has been a spate of investigations on exploitation of Nepali migrant workers in the tiny Arab country of two million—there are, in fact, more Nepalis working in Qatar (341,000) than there are native Qataris (280,000). Yet the plight of Nepali workers in other major labor recipients is as dismal. Nearly 3,500 Nepali workers have been killed abroad in the last five years, as per the Foreign Employment Promotion Board. Malaysia and Saudi Arabia, the top two labor recipients from Nepal, also top the death charts of Nepalis. Since 2000, 37,000 of them have died in Saudi Arabia; another 2,700 Nepali nationals have perished in Malaysia since 2003. A Nepal worker dies in Qatar every two days, The Guardian ominously reported last year.

In Saudi Arabia and Qatar, behind exploitation and abuse of migrants is the kafala system which virtually binds them to one employer. The workers, even when they feel exploited, cannot escape because their passports are confiscated by their employers. Unable to escape their hellish existence, many take their own lives. Other dies working under the scorching Arab sun.

Likewise, most deaths in Malaysia have been attributed to stress from extremely long hours and lack of even basic health care. Change has been slow. The major labor importers, under growing international scrutiny, have tried to reform their systems. But in many cases (Bahrain and Qatar most notably), such measures are merely window dressing to please the international community. Nepal, too, has failed to look after the wellbeing of its workers who account for a quarter of its GDP. The Foreign Employment Act (2007) provisions for a mandatory written contract between workers and their employers, where the terms of employment are clearly outlined. Yet Nepali workers continue to be recruited in droves without any such contract. Regrettably, the kind of seriousness this crucial issue deserves has been sorely missing—both at home and abroad.

Published on: 18 March 2015 | Republica