Dennis is 38 years old. In 2020 he decides to go to work in Qatar hoping to find a job. better salary than in Kenya. A recruiting agency promised him a contract as a security guard at a well-known Doha hotel. But as soon as he arrived in Qatar, he was disappointed.
“They picked me up at the airport and took me to the place where I went to work. And I ended up in a construction company carrying bricks, like a bricklayer. It was not at all what I expected. But I had no choice, I had to work,” he remembers.
And even more because in Kenya Dennis went into debt to pay $ 1,300 to his recruitment agency a contract in which no clause would be respected: neither the function, nor the salary, which would ultimately be 30% lower than announced due to a frenetic work schedule.
“We were supposed to work 8 hours a day, but really it was more like 13 or 14 hours with a 10 minute break time to eat and drink. Then you go back to work. Even today it hurts to spend a lot of time without being able to sit down, carrying heavy things,” he says.
“Some days I had to help two bricklayers instead of one, and the supervisor would tell me: ‘You have to work hard because the stadium has to be finished in 2022 for the World Cup.’ And if we asked for overtime pay, they threatened to fire us“, he claims.
Workers treated like slaves
After leaving Qatar, Dennis is still very marked, physically and morally, and it is in a broken voice that he recounts the humiliations suffered in the comedy. “Sometimes they called us monkeys. It was really painful. They told us: “You, black monkey, work faster.” Do this, do that.” It was awful. It was drama for us.
In his report, Equidem Ong denounces “practices similar to forced labour”.
Did Dennis and his colleagues have the freedom to move outside of work? There was no formal ban, but what Dennis describes, like other workers in this report, It is a climate of fear and vigilance even in the bedroom, isolated from everything.
“After work, you’re not free to move as you like. They don’t like it. We didn’t feel free, more like confined.”
Some reforms not implemented
However, Qatar has implemented reforms to improve labor law. Equidem talks about it in his report.
In particular, Qatar imposed a minimum wage and largely abolished the sponsorship system that prevented employees from leaving the country or changing jobs without employer permission, but enforcement of these laws remains uncertain, according to the NGO, and insufficient remedies.
Geoffrey Owino, a former migrant worker in Qatar, has been arrested on several occasions for try to enforce these laws. He now works for the NGO Equidem in Kenya.
“Some businessmen they are untouchable. They do the opposite of what is written in the law and nothing happens to them. I’ll give you an example of what happens,” he offers.
And he explains: “You are about to file a complaint with the Ministry of Labor because your rights have been violated, but your employer rushes to contact the Ministry of the Interior, i.e. to the police, and report you as a fugitive. Well, you’ll be kicked out before they hear you out. The government itself is divided. And this is to the detriment of the workers.
In a statement, the World Cup organizing committee refute these allegations and denounces a report “full of inaccuracies and misrepresentations”.
In a more nuanced statement, FIFA said it was “in contact with (its) Qatari counterparts to evaluate the information contained in the report”.
RFI
Source: Clarin
