Labour rights and exploitation

Employment exploitation or Labor Exploitation refers to the situation in which either through wages or forcing people to work in sub-par conditions. In more extreme cases, Exploitation will include instances of deception, force, or blackmail from employers.

Sometimes a company makes some methods and regulations in their contracts to make some Exploitation legal. But it becomes illegal when an employer oversteps the protection offered to workers.

How does Exploitation Occur?

Employees, most of the time, are dependent on their job for several reasons. The first and most important reason is the financial security that the job offers and the power to remove this is in the employer’s hands. Dependency also occurs from the benefits like healthcare that the company provides. Another less significant reason is the attachment from the company. People engage their self-esteem with the job, and employers use these emotions to exploit the workers.

What can be considered Exploitation?

There are several methods or ways that employers use to do Exploitation. The most common type is overworking employees. Overworking can happen in various ways and varying degrees of intensity. Still, if we look into some of the data from America, about 80% of American employees are overworked in some capacity. This is especially true for worker positions as management positioning doesn’t report as many hours in overtime.

Another type of employee exploitation can include holding back benefits, frequent delays in salary disbursements, denying any compensation, and employee exploitation based on appearance and origin. Harassment of any form also falls under an extreme form of Exploitation.

Human Rights Day –

10 December

Why do we celebrate Human Rights Day?

Human Rights Day is celebrated annually across the world on 10 December every year.

The date was chosen to honor the United Nations General Assembly’s adoption and proclamation, on 10 December 1948, of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), the first global enunciation of human rights and one of the first major achievements of the new United Nations.

This day is celebrated to raise awareness about people’s social, cultural, and physical rights and to ensure the welfare of everyone. The United Nations on this day encourages nations to create equal opportunities for everyone and address the issues of inequality, exclusion, and discrimination

What can we do about this?

There are various ways to create a system that helps companies understand the root causes of Exploitation. To prevent the blame from being passed on to you, it is advised that employees place formal complaints or refuse situations that might lead to things like overworking.

If we look into the personal level, creating these boundaries can help in most workplaces. On a legal front, we can advise hiring an employment lawyer. They help generate some consultation for you based on your conditions.

A decade of worry for two months of joy.

Human rights violations against labors have been seen in many instances around the globe, which has sparked dialogue among human rights activists, institutions, and corporations.

Since the last decade, one of the recent and ongoing allegations for human rights violation is the exploitation of south Asian Migrants in Qatar in their construction projects for FIFA World Cup 2022. Migrant workers from India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Philippines work in Qatar to provide for their families at home, where they lack stable job opportunities.

But Qatar does not have a proper system to segregate the migrant population by nations, doesn’t reveal the average pay, frequency of payment, legal status etc. This practice came heavily under scrutiny in public. The problem fueled further when there was speculation of deaths of migrant workers continuously for the past four years. Despite the voices of human rights organizations worldwide to officially report these deaths by classifying them by origin and age, Qatar did not take any action.

Human Rights Watch, an international NGO upon research on this issue, reveals that “Abuses of migrant workers’ rights in Qatar are serious and systemic and that the violations often stem from its labor governance system known as kafala (sponsorship), which ties migrant worker’s legal status in the country to their employers.”

With pressure from the International Labor Organization and other human rights entities and the rising voices of many football players and countries, Qatar has introduced various reforms, promised to abolish the kafala system, set up labor dispute resolution committees, and established some labor protection laws in the country.

Sadly, the implementation of these measures and the practicality of the current situation is still a worry, and the workers are still under the danger of exploitation and abuse.

References and data: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2016/03/qatar-world-cup-of-shame/https://www.hrw.org/news/2021/08/02/migrant-workers-and-qatar-world-cup

Note: The first person to solve the crossword gets an Amazon Voucher of Rs 100

Please mail the answers at humain-i@iimidr.ac.in latest by 6th of December

Article Corner by

Name: Shubham Kumar Chandravanshi

PGPHRM 2021-23

Indian Institute of Management Indore

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