BAHRAIN: Poor working conditions drive some immigrant labourers in Bahrain to suicide

Manual workers in Bahrain, many of whom come from the Indian subcontinent in the hope of earning some money to make a better life for them and their families, find themselves living and working in very difficult conditions that sometimes push some of them into despair Bahrain, which has undergone a construction boom on the backs of labourers recruited from the Indian Subcontinent, has been facing an ever-increasing problem of worker suicide. Squalid living conditions, financial difficulties coupled with feelings of estrangement have all been pigeonholed as sources of the problem. The Indian embassy in Bahrain says a "large proportion" of the deaths it has registered this year have been suicides of immigrant workers, who make up about a third of Bahrain's population, but who have few rights and little legal protection. The Bahraini Khaleej Times newspaper quoted welfare worker John Iype as saying that at least 20 per cent of the 96 deaths recorded by the Indian embassy up to June 4 of this year were suicides. There are some 260,000 workes in Bahrain from India. Few rights and low pay are common in the Gulf, where workers from south Asia have long come to toil. Most live in squalid camps outside the gleaming Gulf cities they were hired to build. But Bahrain is the only Gulf state to have a fully implemented free trade agreement with the United States, which obliges it to protect workers' rights, such as the right to form trade unions and lobby for better working conditions. Nevertheless, the Bahraini government appears to fall short on certain aspects. "Labourers are faced with situations where their security is not insured. The workplace isn't safe, they have no access to health and safety benefits, they have familial problems, personal problems, all of these issues make them consider suicide,'' said Alawi Shabr, director of the National Advisory Committee for Health and Safety. In November, Bahrain outlawed strikes and worker protests in most sectors, a month after labour law reforms banning the sacking of strikers sparked a wave of union activity. The roots of most hardship suffered by Bahrain's immigrant workers, and a likely cause of many suicides, welfare workers say, is Bahrain's sponsorship system and lack of a minimum wage. Foreign workers must have a job offer from a Bahraini sponsor before they can enter the country to work. Once they do, they may only work for that sponsor, and cannot change employer before their contract ends without the sponsor's consent. Employers have also been blamed from withholding passports, preventing the free movement of their employees. "I have been in Bahrain for four years and a half. My employer has taken possession of my passport so I cannot go home even if I wanted to. I have been unemployed for five months. I am unwell, I have diabetes. I have no money to get myself medical treatment. I am struggling hard to survive," said a Bangladeshi labourer, Mohamed Shafiq. Unscrupulous recruiters in India and Bahrain are known to charge prospective workers as much as 1,000 Bahraini dinars ($2,652) for the chance to work in the Gulf, without providing a binding contract specifying salary and working conditions. The workers borrow heavily to pay the fee, sometimes using their land as collateral. When they arrive in Bahrain, they find the average wage for an unskilled worker is about 55 dinars a month, and that payment is often withheld for long periods. Bahrain's Labour Ministry corroborated the scenario as a typical reason for worker suicides. ''What's apparent is that the problem lays in the source country. The recruitment agencies, unfortunately give unrealistic amounts of hope to the labourer in that when he arrives in a Gulf country, one of which being Bahrain, he will make a fortune in a short period of time. The labourer pays large amounts of money, up to 1000 Dinars ($2,652), between 600-100 Dinars, is reduced to selling his possessions to afford this, based on the premiss that when he arrives in Bahrain, he will make the money back," said Deputy Labour Minister, Sheikh Abdel Rahman Bin Abdullah Al Khalifa. "He is then surprised by what he gets, because his salary, which is quite reasonable isn't the fortune that he was expecting. Debts and problems become suffocating, and push the labourer to end his life by the very unfortunate method that we know,'' he added A patch of congealed blood remains on the road where Ashokan Vamoora hit the tarmac, the second Indian worker in three months to jump from a bridge spanning one of Bahrain's busiest highways. Hamza Maheen, an Indian salesman who also jumped from the bridge, fell through the front windscreen of a passing car. More recently, bodies of Indian workers found hanging have become an almost regular feature in the Bahraini press.

ITN Source | July 26, 2007

Tags:. .spanning. .possessions. .familial. .diabetes. .implemented