Does Skill Make Us Human?
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Does Skill Make Us Human?

Migrant Workers in 21st-Century Qatar and Beyond

Natasha Iskander

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eBook - ePub

Does Skill Make Us Human?

Migrant Workers in 21st-Century Qatar and Beyond

Natasha Iskander

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About This Book

An in-depth look at Qatar's migrant workers and the place of skill in the language of control and power Skill—specifically the distinction between the "skilled" and "unskilled"—is generally defined as a measure of ability and training, but Does Skill Make Us Human? shows instead that skill distinctions are used to limit freedom, narrow political rights, and even deny access to imagination and desire. Natasha Iskander takes readers into Qatar's booming construction industry in the lead-up to the 2022 World Cup, and through her unprecedented look at the experiences of migrant workers, she reveals that skill functions as a marker of social difference powerful enough to structure all aspects of social and economic life.Through unique access to construction sites in Doha, in-depth research, and interviews, Iskander explores how migrants are recruited, trained, and used. Despite their acquisition of advanced technical skills, workers are commonly described as unskilled and disparaged as "unproductive, " "poor quality, " or simply "bodies." She demonstrates that skill categories adjudicate personhood, creating hierarchies that shape working conditions, labor recruitment, migration policy, the design of urban spaces, and the reach of global industries. Iskander also discusses how skill distinctions define industry responses to global warming, with employers recruiting migrants from climate-damaged places at lower wages and exposing these workers to Qatar's extreme heat. She considers how the dehumanizing politics of skill might be undone through tactical solidarity and creative practices.With implications for immigrant rights and migrant working conditions throughout the world, Does Skill Make Us Human? examines the factors that justify and amplify inequality.

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CHAPTER ONE

Regulation

HOW THE POLITICS OF SKILL BECOME LAW
ON DECEMBER 2, 2010, Sepp Blatter, president of FIFA, the world soccer federation, pried open a white envelope on a stage in Zurich. He announced in award ceremony style that the 2022 World Cup hosting rights had been awarded to Qatar. The small Gulf nation, widely seen as a dark horse in the race, had beat out bids from the United States, Japan, Korea, and Australia. As the Qatari delegation—visibly moved—leaped up and embraced one another, President Bill Clinton, heading up the delegation from the United States and seated in the front row at the ceremony, smiled wanly. The Washington Post reported that when he returned to the Savoy hotel, he smashed a mirror in rage at the outcome.1
At the close of the internationally televised ceremony, Blatter glossed the controversial decision as a brave new step for FIFA, saying, “We go to new lands.
 [T]he Middle East and the Arabic world have been waiting for a long time.” Hassan Al-Thawadi, the chief executive of the Qatar bid, echoed Blatter’s sentiment, declaring, “We can allow history to be made while opening up the gates of communication between east and west. The Middle East will be put on a platform for everyone to see it as it truly is. And, more importantly, it allows the Middle East to interact with the rest of the world, so that any misconceptions that people here have about the west can be taken away.”2
Labor and human rights organizations took Al-Thawadi at his word. Within months, they began issuing reports on labor abuses in Qatar. The International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) published an exposĂ© in May 2011 that detailed the working and living conditions of workers.3 The labor organization warned of the intensified exploitation of migrant laborers in the run-up to the World Cup and estimated that four thousand workers would die as a result of labor practices in Qatar before the first ball of the 2022 games was kicked. The ITUC called for Qatar to be stripped of the games and promised that labor organizations around the world “would mobilize workers and football fans to target each of FIFA’s football associations and the international body to stop the World Cup in Qatar if labor rights are not respected.”4 Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International followed with reports of their own, in 2012 and 2013, respectively, showing that abusive labor practices were endemic in Qatar, and particularly acute in the construction industry.5 Media accounts of the poor treatment of migrant workers soon ran under the mastheads of major international newspapers and on cable news channels, with headlines that exposed Qatar’s “World Cup ‘slaves’ ”6
The catalog of abuses that these dispatches recorded was devastating. The reports highlighted the pervasiveness of wage theft and prolonged nonpayment of wages, enumerating cases where workers labored without pay for months at a time. They featured worker testimonies of forced labor and overtime, and management’s habitual disregard of health and safety protections. More disturbingly, they described workers being recruited under false premises and trapped in a form of debt bondage, working to pay back the middlemen who charged them up to a year’s wages for jobs in Qatar. They cited the widespread practice of passport confiscation and the physical intimidation that kept workers confined to the labor camps where they were housed.
The reports backed their allegations by documenting the effects of exploitation on workers’ bodies. Many of the reports featured graphic depictions of worker injuries, illustrated in many cases by photographs of the damage—literal bodies of evidence of the effects of exploitation. Some organizations analyzed patterns of bodily harm to extrapolate specific forms of employer negligence. Amnesty International’s 2013 report, for example, referenced the high rate of injuries to the head and spine (as compared to injuries to the lower extremities) as evidence that worker deaths and disabilities were caused by workers falling on their heads from accidents that could have been prevented with adequate safety measures and protective equipment.7
Damage to the body was not limited to the workplace. Human rights and press reports contained ubiquitous evidence of substandard living conditions. Their exposés featured videos and photos of housing facilities that were cramped, squalid, and lacking basic infrastructure. They showed small sleeping rooms where bunk beds were stacked floor to ceiling, and ten to fifteen men slept in shifts on planks or the floor on thin, disintegrating foam mattresses. Photographs documented the absence of air-conditioning units, and captured the filth of kitchen and bathroom facilities, where clogged sinks and urinals were filled with the sludge of human and kitchen waste. Other photos showed open septic tanks and sewage that had overflowed into the courtyard of housing facilities, and living spaces piled with trash, toxic construction materials, and debris.
FIFA soon found itself buckling under accusations that it was abetting manslaughter in Qatar. After much prevarication, Blatter finally conceded in 2014 that labor abuse in Qatar’s construction industry was “unacceptable” and urged its government to introduce “fair working conditions.” The sporting organization pressed the Gulf nation to adhere to the worker rights listed in the International Labor Organization’s (ILO) core standards and eliminate all forms of forced labor. International firms building the infrastructure for the games fell in line and publicly pledged to elevate their labor policies to international best practices. The emir of Qatar soon entered the fray, declaring in an interview with CNN later that year that he was “personally hurt about the situation.” He insisted that Qatar had stepped up the enforcement of protective legislation and instituted new regulations to ensure that employers paid their workers.8
Sharon Burrow, the general secretary of the ITUC, dismissed the commitment to reform as “empty promises,” adding that “Qatar is a slave state. The discrimination, the racism, the denial of rights for 1.4 million migrant workers adds up to apartheid and a model of employment that is simply slavery.”9
As headlines about “world cup slaves” amassed, commentators began to opine on the apparent contradiction between Qatar’s regressive labor practices and the hypermodernity that it projected to the world. “Though Doha, the capital, looks uber-modern, with glittering skyscrapers and innovative architecture, its labor system is less forward-looking,” observed the BCC.10 “The plight of foreign laborers in the Gulf underscores a dark underside to the modern, glossy exterior the GCC [Gulf Cooperation Council] states like to showcase to the world,” concurred Foreign Policy in Focus.11 The implication was that the iconic buildings that drew Doha’s distinctive skyline, so flamboyantly avant-garde in their architecture, represented development at its most dystopian: the most backward and brutish exploitation gilded with a thin veneer of modernity.
Many news outlets and human rights organizations pointed to the country’s kafala system as the source of the “slavery-like” conditions. Kafala was the country’s sponsorship system for the employment of foreign workers. Under the terms of the law that specified this system, all foreign workers had to have a “sponsor”—or kafeel (pl. kafala). The regulation stipulated that the sponsor had to be an employer, either a Qatari individual or company, and all legal rights afforded to the sponsored worker devolved from that tie. The foreigner’s employment obligation to the sponsor was exclusive and binding. A worker could not change jobs without their sponsor’s permission or quit their job until the end of the contract for any reason, including nonpayment of wages and abuse. A migrant’s right to reside in Qatar was entirely at the pleasure of the sponsor, who could terminate and deport migrant employees without advance notice or cause. At the time that FIFA awarded Qatar the hosting privileges for the World Cup, the sponsor also controlled the ability of their foreign workers to leave the country; with few exceptions, foreigners required an exit visa, approved by their employer, in order to travel out of Qatar.
In most advocacy reports and press accounts of labor conditions in Qatar, the country’s kafala system was described as only a somewhat more restrictive version of a cultural practice that was widespread in the Gulf, with Qatar’s neighbors all also enforcing sponsorship systems to manage foreign labor. A smattering of scholarly and popular guesses about the origins of the kafala system alternatively characterized it as an indigenous form of labor regulation, a holdover from tribal social conventions for the treatment of foreigners, or an Islamic jurisprudential take on the obligations involved in wage-based employment relationships.12 Regardless, the kafala system was implicitly represented as an endemic and timeless feature of Arab culture, peculiar and archaic, and reflective, at its worst, of the despotic and venal tendencies that had made Blatter’s “lands of the Middle East and the Arabic world” at once so inscrutable and difficult to penetrate, yet so needful of civilizing intervention.13
This, however, was a mischaracterization of the kafala system—one that radically minimized its significance as an expression of global trends in the management of migrant labor.
Far from being a cultural aberration, the kafala system in Qatar as well as the Gulf more broadly was the product of more than a century of global economic exchange. The Gulf had been the site of modern global commodity production and extraction ever since the late 1880s, beginning with pearls and dates, followed by oil and gas exploitation after the Second World War, and in the twenty-first century, the production of platforms for global finance, culture, and transport. Vast numbers of workers had to be imported into the region to produce goods for global markets, and the kafala system that modern-day commentators maligned as tribal and backward was actually a composite of more recent international regulatory structures brought in to govern as well as control those workers. The regulations themselves reflected contemporary conventions of the treatment of labor, and were shaped by global debates on the rights of workers and definition of freedom. The Qatari kafala system, when that FIFA envelope was pried open in Zurich, was no different; it was produced by an uneasy interaction between existing regulation and international law, and contested and amended through global conversations about the rights of migrant workers.
Global debates about labor have explicitly wrestled with the definition of freedom, and how to distinguish and protect it from forms of unfreedom and bondage. In these conversations, past and present, and the regulations they produced, the idea of skill emerges as a central and definitional concept. Underpinning these attempts to delineate freedom has been the development of a set of understandings about skill—specifically, who is skilled and who is not, the agency required to acquire skill and exercise it, and the fullness of freedom associated with skill, as compared to the debased version of freedom associated with its lack. In many of these debates, skill was implicitly treated as having an ontological status associated with freedom rather than a reflection of work-related competence. In the Gulf in general and Qatar specifically, workers who were viewed as skilled were also seen as free, as people who acted agentically and volitionally, and their status as free actors was confirmed by the many regulatory layers that governed migration to the region. Migrants perceived as unskilled, however, were also viewed as having a propensity for bondage, lacking agency, and vulnerable to being bound in contractual arrangements that were unfree. For unskilled workers, the definition of freedom was narrowed from one that centered on the status of the worker as a contractually free person to one that focused instead on the conditions of work, and whether or not they were humane. Debates, local and global, about labor regulations that applied to workers who were considered unskilled dealt with how to shield them from bodily exploitation. Freedom for the unskilled, in law and advocacy, was less an expression of political autonomy than a bodily condition.
The kafala system in the Gulf and particularly Qatar, reformed, amended, and modernized, has always been a product of global economic exchange and debates about definitions of skill, agency, and freedom. The attention that the World Cup brought to the tiny desert kingdom turned Qatar into a place where regulatory structures for the global management and control of migrant workers were hashed out. International observers and advocates pushed for worker rights, and international organizations, from the ILO to FIFA, took on formal roles in amending Qatari legislation and advancing norms around the treatment of migrant workers.14 As a result, Qatar become an arena where the relationship between migrant rights and skill was defined, and the definitions of freedom were stretched, contested, and honed. Represented as a strange and to some extent brutish kingdom, Qatar became the place where controversial questions about the political rights associated with skill, and whether rights should differ by skill level, could be asked and explored. Debates over the rights of migrant workers in Qatar became debates about the rights of migrant workers everywhere.
To understand what was old and new in these debates, we have to reach back to Qatar’s participation in global commodity production over the past century, and examine the definitions of freedom and skill that have shaped labor regulations. These regulations and norms extend past the boundaries of modern-day Qatar to the Gulf more broadly and beyond. But since contemporary conversations about migrant rights and skill centered on Qatar, they pulled what was specific to Qatar into the current global debates. A review of the evolution of regulatory structures and norms during successive waves of commodity production in Qatar illuminates how contemporary debates reproduced as well as carried forward the political meanings these structures and norms en...

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