Deadly fire exposes plight of low-paid migrants in Kuwait

On a recent day in Kuwait, four Indian migrant workers stood by the side of a road with their belongings stuffed into bags.

Suresh Kumar, 52, and his roommates had just been evicted as authorities searched their neighborhood for building code violations after a June fire that killed 49 migrant workers, the vast majority of them Indian. The four men had shared a 16-square-meter room on the ground floor of an apartment building, but living on the ground floor is prohibited, so the landlord was demolishing the room.

They were now homeless and didn’t know where to go.

Kuwait is one of the richest countries in the world, with a $980 billion sovereign wealth fund built on oil revenues. But little of that wealth is enjoyed by migrant workers, who often struggle with inadequate housing and low wages, and have limited power to seek redress.

Kumar and his roommates were construction workers subcontracted on projects for Kuwait’s state-owned oil and refining company. Since an entire apartment would cost more than double what they could afford, they were resigned to finding another room to share, with no guarantee that it would be any safer than their old abode.

The high death toll from the June fire — which gutted a seven-story building housing nearly 200 migrant workers — shocked people across Kuwait. It spurred a rare public reckoning over unsafe housing for migrant workers, as inspectors were deployed to detect building code violations.

But that response fell short of addressing the structural problems afflicting migrant workers in Kuwait and other Gulf countries, human rights activists say. In some cases, the government’s response punished migrants — evicting them and leaving them fearing deportation.

“It’s a perfect and tragic example of how migrant workers only get noticed when there’s some kind of catastrophe,” said James Lynch, a director at FairSquare, a London-based research group that investigates rights abuses.

Employers in Kuwait are obliged to provide accommodation, but many migrant workers said they had been left to fend for themselves after being evicted with little notice.

At the heart of the problem, activists and migrant rights experts say, lies a system governing foreign labor in the Gulf called “kafala” — which ties workers to their employers — as well as the power imbalances faced by migrants who flock to the Gulf from poorer nations in Asia and Africa. Across the Gulf, lower-income migrants work as truck drivers, construction workers, cashiers and more.

“There is no incentive for anyone to change the system,” said Manishankar Prasad, a labor researcher in Malaysia. “Because for every worker who dies, there are 10 other people who will replace them within a day.”

Kuwaiti regulations specify that no more than four workers are to be accommodated in a room and set minimum space requirements per person. Employers must provide air conditioning and at least one toilet for every eight workers.

But some workers described six people crammed into small rooms inside illegally subdivided apartments.

When migrant workers arrive in the Gulf, they are often hired by third-party contractors, who sponsor their visas and house them while they perform work for other companies. These arrangements allow the workers’ final employers to subcontract the hiring and housing of migrant workers.

“It’s a convenient transfer of risk and responsibility to the private sector,” Lynch said.

But, he added, blaming the private sector “overlooks a key part of what is happening here — the failure of the state to fulfill its obligation.”