sponsorship--- a good initiative

Rights group calls for more labour-friendly legislation
Q
atar needs to enforce more migrant-worker friendly legislation to ensure that everything
is in place before the large-scale arrival
of workers for projects to be undertaken and executed as part of the 2022
FIFA World Cup, Human Rights Watch,
an international forum having oi ces
worldwide, said in its report released in
Doha yesterday.
At an inter-action with a group of
journalists and representatives of
groups committed to protect human
rights in the Middle East and North
African (Mena) countries, the organisation’s representatives said that the
government and FIFA together needed to make sure that the commitments that they had made to respect
workers’ rights in preparation for the
World Cup were carried out impeccably.
Construction contractors, they said,
also should make commitments to uphold international labour standards.
The 146-page report, “Building a
Better World Cup: Protecting Workers
in Qatar ahead of 2022 World Cup” examined a recruitment and employment
system that ef ectively traps many migrant workers in their jobs.
“The problems they face include
exorbitant recruitment fee which can
take years to pay of , employers’ routine
confi scation of workers passports, and
Qatar’s restrictive sponsorship system
that gives employers inordinate control
over their employees,” said the organisation.
“Workers building stadiums won’t
be benefi ted from the country’s promise to end the sponsorship system.
Rather they should need a deadline for
this to happen before their work for
FIFA tourney started,” said the forum’s
Middle East director at Human Rights
Watch, Sarah Leah Whitson.
Besides Whitson, forum’s Cairobased researcher Priyanka Motoparthy
and its legal adviser Nicholas McGeehan spoke.
The forum pointed out that foreign
workers, under the prevailing sponsorship laws, could not change jobs
without their employers’ permission
regardless of whether they had worked
two years or 20 years and they must
get their sponsoring employer to sign
“exit” permits before they left the
country.
“Saudi Arabia is the only other Gulf
state that retained the problematic exit
permit system while the other four GCC
states now allow workers to change jobs
after serving out their contract or after
a two- or three-year period with their
initial employer,” according to the report.
The forum recalls that in May Qatar’s Labour ministry had announced
that the government might replace
the sponsorship system with contracts
between employers and employees.
“However it failed to specify how these
contracts could replace the current
immigration laws or whether workers would be entitled to switch jobs,” it
pointed out.

http://www.gulf-times.com/mritems/streams/2012/6/13/2_512010_1_255.06.12...