Saudi Arabia accused of widespread abuses of migrant workers

The UK’s arms partner, Saudi Arabia, has been accused by African trade unions of persistent and widespread violations and abuses of migrant workers’ rights, and is now seeking to dismiss a formal complaint at the International Labour Organisation on the matter despite ongoing evidence of forced labour and abuse, according to Amnesty International.

The Western-backed Gulf theocracy — Saudi Arabia — was one of the biggest recipients of the UK’s arms exports in 2024, according to a recent report by Campaign Against Arms Trade.

According to Amnesty, the complaint documents widespread forced labour, wage theft, physical and sexual abuse and systemic racism, particularly — but not exclusively — targeting African migrant workers who experienced being locked in homes, forced to work 18 to 20 hours a day, denied wages, healthcare and rest, and subjected to beatings and harassment.

Amnesty is urging ILO member states like the UK not to let the complaint be buried during the 356th Session of the ILO Governing Body, which runs from 23 March to 2 April.

In January, the Government of Saudi Arabia responded to the complaint and asked for it to be dismissed.

Vulnerable workers in Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Gulf

Across the six countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council — Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain and Oman — migrant workers form the backbone of oil and gas-rich economies, according to the Business and Human Rights Centre.

The region’s population is roughly 60 million, of whom more than half are migrants.

However, a pattern of human rights violations across the GCC of migrant labour has been seen.

India’s Firstpost reported last year that thousands of Indian nationals face imprisonment or death sentences in the region. In the UAE, 29 Indians are on death row. In Saudi Arabia, 12 are facing execution. Migrant workers endure harsh conditions. Employers often confiscate their passports. Local laws are applied rigidly.

Separately, a Guardian investigation from 2021 revealed that more than 6,500 migrant workers from India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka died in Qatar in the decade after it was awarded the World Cup. That averaged 12 deaths per week. Most deaths were classified as “natural”, often without autopsies.

Qatar hosted the FIFA World Cup in 2022.

Burnt of Iran’s retaliatory strikes

Unsurprisingly, these workers are also facing the repercussions of Trump’s illegal war on Iran.

According to Al Jazeera, of the eight people killed in the UAE in Iranian retaliatory strikes, five were from South Asia. Three people killed in Oman were from India. An Indian and a Bangladeshi national were the only deaths in Saudi Arabia. Millions of migrant workers now face job losses and fear as the conflict escalates.

Despite the danger, most South Asian migrant labour in the Gulf appears to be staying on for now, according to DW.

“Economic survival trumps perceived risks for the vast majority” of workers, Harsh Pant, head of the strategic studies program at the Observer Research Foundation (ORF), a New Delhi think tank, told DW.

Scholar Adam Hanieh has shown that the “racialised and gendered” characteristics of the working class population in the Gulf States favour temporary workers. Hanieh wrote:

…in the case of the Gulf Arab states, the pronounced shift away from Arab to Asian workers through the 1990s and 2000s was likewise conceived as a means of discouraging workers from forming bonds of cultural belonging, and was also organised through the spatial separation of these workers from local Gulf citizens.

This means Gulf employers extract maximum profit from the Asian and African labourer while bearing none of the true costs of reproducing that labour like education, healthcare, housing and childcare.

Vicious circle

This is the vicious circle the UK is part of and gains from. British arms sales to Saudi Arabia help prop up a Gulf system that relies on migrant labour from South Asia and Africa.

Workers in that system face exploitation, abuse and death. The UK is an ILO member state. It is now being urged not to let Saudi Arabia bury a formal complaint over those very violations.

Featured image via Amnesty