While employer-tied visas are becoming increasingly widespread as a tool of immigration control, their most extreme example remains the Kafala system in the states of the Gulf Cooperation Council (Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait and Oman). All foreign workers in the GCC, barring a negligible minority, are subject to Kafala. This means that they can only enter, work and remain through the sponsorship of a citizen or business.

The Kafala system is not simply a visa framework, as seasonal worker permits in other countries are. It comprises legal codes across several independent jurisdictions, cultural practices and soft laws.

This makes Kafala particularly challenging to abolish, but challenging is not the same as impossible. Kafala could be abolished. Doing so, however, would require commitment and the concerted efforts of local, national, multilateral and interagency all pulling in the same direction.

Right now that feels a long way off. GCC states show little appetite for abolition, but there have been efforts to reform the system. These processes have so far targeted issues affecting workers in a piecemeal fashion and fall short of significantly protecting the labour rights of all migrants.

Why? Because Kafala's defining feature is that whatever checks and balances are introduced, they do not meaningfully question the power that lies with citizens and businesses who sponsor workers.

Can Kafala be meaningfully reformed?

Broadly speaking, the main elements of the Kafala system that have been subject to some level of reform in at least some places are:

• ability to leave the country or change jobs without the sponsor's permission
• ability to stay in the country after the end of a job contract

But the following have not been broached in any meaningful manner:

• access to grievance mechanisms
• minimum living wages and social protection
• employer accountability
• access to justice

I'd like to focus on one critical aspect of Kafala that persists despite all of the scattered, and sometimes significant reforms: wage slavery.

Wages are kept extremely low where workers are completely dependent on their sponsor/employer for visa status, work, food, accommodation, and transportation. Having a monopoly on the means of survival gives sponsors enormous leverage, and far too many use that to their advantage. GCC countries have also negotiated bilateral agreements with many migrant-sending countries, which is another factor keeping wages low.

Kafala's apologists defend poor contractual terms by saying that workers come to the Gulf out of choice, so what's on offer can't be that bad. But choice is a mirage in unequal societies. Lower-income workers migrate for work primarily for financial reasons: they aim to remit enough money to sustain their families and improve their future prospects.

But their realistic options for doing that are extremely limited, and all come with risks. One of the few avenues open to them is the Gulf. That is why they 'choose' to go there. That and the GCC's extreme and permanent dependence on migrant labour to fuel their economies.

No amount of relativisation can explain that away. Kafala must be abolished, or reformed to the point of being unrecognisable. Anything else is indefensible.

Kafala isn't the only problem

In 2023, India received 13% of all global remittances, and more than a third came from the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. India's total remittances that year - some $119.5 billion - constituted 3.4% of the country's GDP.

About two-thirds of non-resident Indians - 8.8 of 13.4 million - live in the Gulf. These figures are not seen as an opportunity for stronger negotiations to protect workers' rights, but as a means of profiting further from workers by increasing migration costs. This goes to maintain a paucity mentality amongst workers who feel they have to pay in order to benefit from a job abroad, even when it increases their financial liability.

Additionally, Asian and African states are proactively trying to export their populations as the world's labourers, marketing them as candidates of choice. The Philippines is the most advanced in this regard, with its Technical Education and Skills Development Authority (TESDA) advertising "world class Filipino workers" for hire. This model is now benchmarked by other worker-sending countries.

This focus on the production of 'good migrants' and 'ideal workers' is a race to the bottom. We have not seen wages increasing in keeping with the rising cost of living at point of origin and destination. Minimum wages, even those determined through bilateral agreements, can be as low as $180 a month. Meanwhile costs of migration and recruitment have been on the rise. It's a pincer move that's hitting migrants from both sides. Yet, more and more workers are travelling abroad in desperation as opportunities and livelihoods dry up at home.

Workers are selling their meagre assets and/or taking loans to finance their migration. Wages from the first several months of a job contract almost all go into paying off these debts, and this is when the employment goes as planned. However, starting wages are low and regular increments are not penned into the contract.

Despite various reforms in the six GCC states, only two have a minimum wage: Kuwait with KD75 ($244) and Qatar with QR1000 ($274). This is not a fair living wage in countries with a per capita GDP of around $37,000 and $87,000 respectively. Overall wages are kept so low that no matter what the reforms promise, workers who file a complaint or end up temporarily unemployed risk destitution.

Any tactic to reduce that dependency or to improve the financial status would mean taking risks, like working irregular jobs with employers who aren't their sponsors. This is criminalised across the GCC states.

Paper reforms

Overall, what we have seen is that the reforms that have been introduced have, in some ways, made it a bit harder to exploit workers. But they have emphatically not dismantled the Kafala system, which is the foundation of the exploitation.

On paper, it is now more difficult to report a worker as a 'runaway', to terminate their employment, to deport them, or to steal their wages. But in reality one can still do all of these things because workers are in positions of such extreme vulnerability that they are unable to fight their case. This is why wage slavery endures.

The most extreme repercussions of the Kafala system are experienced by domestic workers and others engaged in marginalised sectors that are excluded from labour laws and from many of these reforms. Here the accountability, or lack thereof, does not fall on corporations, but on individuals whose citizenship status offers them impunity. The invisibility and isolation of these workers renders them unable to access even the most basic of labour rights.

Today the GCC is signing agreements with weak and impoverished countries in Africa and Asia to bring in yet more migrants. When they arrive they will learn the hard truth as others have before them. As long as the Kafala system exists they will be wage slaves.

From openDemocracy