When Meilani Yuswandari, an Indonesian from Jakarta, completed her higher secondary education, she began looking for work abroad. During her search, Yuswandari met a recruiting agent who assured her of an office job in Jordan. But when she reached the country in 2011, she realised that the office job she was promised did not exist. […]
A Malayalam TV show has helped track down as many as 530 missing migrant workers in the Gulf. For the families of the missing, the show is a saviour A cousin’s sudden suicide within days of taking up an engineer’s job in Muscat saw Rafeek Ravuther wake up to the dark side of Gulf migration. […]
Unlike other countries in West Asia, Jordan lacks petrodollars. In 1996, an agreement with the US gave the country preferential duty-free and quota-free access to the American market. This was the first such agreement the US ever had with an Arab nation and saw the establishment of Qualifying Industrial Zones (QIZ) – essentially, industrial zones created […]
The 2014 South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) summit took an initiative on the issue of migrant labour. It sought to ensure safety, security, and wellbeing of their migrant workers in the destination countries outside the SAARC region. This was to be done with the help of international bodies such as the International Labour […]
More than 4 lakh people hailing from Telangana work in Gulf countries. They are often unaware of the politics, economy, cultural system or even the climate of their destination. As the plane crosses the terrain of Muscat towards Doha, Jyoti and Kumari look in wonder at the 3D display in front of them running images […]
“I want to go back to Muscat to earn as I am not getting a good job in my own country,” says 56-year-old Appukuttan who met his family in India after living miserably for 22 years as an undocumented worker in Muscat. All these years, he has missed the big moments of his personal life. […]
Young Indian females are often lured by agents with false promises of domestic work in Malaysia and then subsequently coerced into commercial sex trade. Twenty-eight-year-old Laxmi (name changed), is among numerous Indian women who come to Malaysia in the hope of a better paying job, but end up falling victim to sex trafficking instead. Young […]
In early June, Nepali authorities announced that they would not issue work permits to outbound workers if employers did not bear the cost for visa and air ticket. The Ministry of Labor and Employment (MoLE) maintained that the provision was meant to prevent economic exploitation of workers in the name of recruitment fee and eventually […]
When everything is a commodity, labour rights count little, says Josiah Mortimer. There’s a war going on in Asia – and it’s one that, unlike ISIS in Iraq or the chaos in Syria, is failing to make the headlines. It’s the war on workers that is taking place across much of the continent, according to […]
“Qatar deserves the best”. That is the slogan on boundary boards along important roads in and around Doha, the capital, with a population of 1.7 million. It ranks as the world’s richest country per capita thanks to its natural gas reserves, the third largest in the world. The country is preparing for the 2022 FIFA […]