12/27/2023 0 Comments Dr maya shankar husbandThe deaths of workers who constructed Qatar’s new World Cup stadiums – a tiny fraction of the overall migrant workforce – may offer a glimpse into what is happening on a bigger scale across the country. In a recent report on occupational injuries in Qatar, the UN’s International Labour Organization said: “There is a need to review the approach taken to investigating deaths of seemingly healthy young workers from ‘natural causes’, to be able to determine whether they are in fact work-related … to ensure workers’ families receive due compensation.” While most families – including Gangaram’s – get compensation from valid personal insurance schemes they must buy in their home countries before departure, the payouts are relatively low. In interviews with the families of seven workers whose deaths were attributed to natural causes, none had received compensation from the companies they worked for. Without proper investigations into these deaths, many families may be losing out on compensation. The cases often involve young men with no apparent health conditions.Īutopsies are rarely carried out in cases of natural death, and the Qatari government has yet to commission an independent study into deaths from cardiac arrest, despite a recommendation to do so from its own lawyers eight years ago. Qatar’s labour law only requires employers to pay compensation if a death occurs at work or directly because of the work, but this narrow definition and the vague categorisation of workers’ deaths can result in companies avoiding accountability.Īs in Gangaram’s case, the majority of fatalities are classified as “natural deaths” due to cardiac or respiratory failure, a term which gives no indication of the underlying cause. There is a need to review the approach taken to investigating deaths of seemingly healthy young workers from ‘natural causes’ International Labour Organization report Laduwati says she has never heard from her husband’s company and, like thousands of other families whose loved ones die in Qatar, did not receive any compensation from his employer.Īll she got was the wages he was owed, and 175,000 rupees (£1,100) from his co-workers, who chipped in to help with funeral expenses. “But now he’s dead and there’s no one I can turn to. I’ll come home and give you whatever you want,” she says. One of her daughters, Baby Kumari, crouches sobbing beside her. And if I feed them, how can I pay for their education? How can I manage my daughters’ dowries?” says Laduwati, sitting outside her home. “How can I feed my children? There’s nothing to eat. His death sent his family into a spiral of debt, poverty and torment. According to his death certificate, he died of “Heart failure natural causes”. Back at his labour camp he went to lie down and never woke up. He had been there for two years when, at the end of a shift in the searing heat of the summer, he began to vomit and feel faint. Photograph: Pete PattissonĪlready in debt, he borrowed more money to pay the extortionate recruitment fee to find work in Qatar, and once there most of his paltry salary – the equivalent of 80 pence an hour – went towards the dowries of three of his daughters. His family received no compensation from his employer. Gangaram Mandal, who died hours after the end of his shift in Qatar in 2020.
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