Inside Qatar by John McManus

Author:John McManus [McManus, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Icon Books
Published: 2022-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Caroline, quiet for so long, begins to speak. After Maggie’s rapier-like voice, hers feels emollient.

‘I realised there is a church. I didn’t know there are churches in Arab countries.’

She asked the lady of the house for a day off to go to church. Her sponsors were a Tunisian couple with three children. She would work for them every day from 6am until midnight. They refused her request. But Caroline wouldn’t let it rest. She learnt that, as an African woman, she was being paid the least and treated the worst. The Arab domestic workers got at least 1,000 rials. The Filipinas 1,300, sometimes even 1,500, and a day off. Caroline began to push back.

‘There are people who are going to church, why not me? So I went, checked Google and then found the labour laws.’

Until 2017, Qatar’s labour protections completely excluded domestic workers. In August of that year, the country ratified a domestic workers’ law, enshrining such provisions as a maximum ten-hour workday, a weekly day off and annual paid leave. But in a familiar refrain, the issue is not the absence of legislation but the implementation. Three years after the passage of the law, Amnesty revealed that 85 per cent of domestic workers they spoke to still did not have a weekly day off and 86 per cent worked more than fourteen hours per day.

Laws relating to domestic workers have been the last to be enacted and the worst enforced. ‘The abolishment of NOCs [Non-Objection Certificates] was much easier than removing exit permits for domestic workers,’ an expert in the legislation told me. ‘Because you’re fucking with their house, with their castle,’ he explained, referring to the Qataris who benefit from the labour of these women in their own homes. ‘The NOC, it’s just money. A business.’ There is a weird paradox. No work is more important than domestic work – raising children, looking after a household. And no work is more intimate. It seems, therefore, that it cannot be classified as work, with the state renouncing the authority to reach behind closed doors. An activist who campaigns for domestic workers told me that many employers don’t even believe that new laws have been passed. ‘You hear comments, “Oh no, maybe that’s a scam, it’s not for real,”’ she said drolly.

Caroline read up on what she was entitled to as a domestic worker, getting increasingly angry. She took the laws to her sponsor and demanded that they wrote a formal contract, gave her a day off and raised her wage. They refused. She lowered her demands. ‘Just give me some more hours to go to church,’ she pleaded. ‘Better I have some free time to relax my mind than subject your kids to all my stress.’ The husband agreed that she could go to church for two hours on a Friday, coming straight back home afterwards.

In the two years she had been in Qatar, attending church was the best thing that had happened to Caroline. After being cooped up

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