1.    Why do so many workers come over to the Gulf to work? What are the benefits of being here? Are there any?

    I picked this question because I think people should understand what the workers are expecting when they come to the gulf and what they are promised. I also want to find out if they get everything they come for.

 

 

2.    How many workers are in each of the Gulf countries? What is the ratio of workers to high class people?

    I think this question is important because if there are a lot of workers in each of the countries why don't they rebel or go on strike? Are there laws against it? Do the workers realize the power they could have? I think people should know what exactly the government does to stop them frm having power. 

 

 

3.    What kind of education do the workers have?

    I picked this one so I could find out what kind of education these workers actually have and so I could show others whether or not they are being put to their full potential.  

 

 

4.   What is being done today to end slavery/ low paid labor? What more needs to be done?

    I chose this one to inform people of what is already being done to end slavery world wide and why or why not it's working. I think it will inspire people to do more and give them ideas about how to acomplish what still needs to be done.

 

 

5.    What conditions do they live in?

    I picked this one so people would put themselves in the workers shoes and so they would imagine living in these same conditions without all the luxuries they have now.  I want to give them a better view of what life for them is really like.

 

 

 

1.    List possible resources.

•  Al Jazeera
• Youtube
• The Peninsula
• Investment Promotion Department
• The 7 Wonders of working in Qatar
• Wikipedia
• Qatar Sux
• National Geographic
• Stranded Workers in Doha
• Gulf Times 

 

2.    Explain what makes a reliable source.

 

          I think a reliable source is one that shows its sources and has information that you can find in a lot of other places. It has to show all the sides of a story and cannot be influenced by any one side. To find out if a source is reliable you need to research and see who owns the source/ who writes or edits it and see if they are associated in any way to what the source is about. For example if you wanted to research about two football teams and about which one was better, you wouldn't go to one of the players because they would obviously say their team. I also think that a reliable source shouldn't only have one person writing it or supplying it with information, because if you have more than one opinion or take of a story then you're more likely to get a better idea of the truth. Also you need to see what kind of point they are trying to make and what they are doing to make that point. A reliable source shouldn't try to make you take sides or think one thing, it should just be telling you the facts.

 

3.    Choose the most reliable sources using what you explained in number 2 to pick them.

 

• Wikipedia- I chose this resource because anyone in the world can edit it and if something is wrong or untrue on it, it is fixed almost imediatly. Also it has the views and opinions of many diferent sides of a story. I think a source is better when it has alot of different people writing it instead of just one or two.

   

• Al Jazeera- I picked this one because Al Jazeera is based in Doha and I don't think they would want to make Doha and the Gulf look bad if it wasn't true. Also, it had information that could be found in many other places. Another thing about news corporations is that they are more liable than blogs and things just written by one normal person, so they have a more of a reason to make sure what they are saying is true because they can be sued. 

   

• The Peninsula- I think The Peninsula is a reliable source for kind of the same reasons as Al Jazeera. It is Doha based so they most likely wouldn't aim to make Doha look bad and they are a news corporation so they can be sued if someone can prove that something they wrote isn't true.

 

• Qatar Sux- I think this website is pretty reliable because they have articles form many different resources and they cite all of the sources. Also, clearly whoever runs this website is pretty passionate about the topic and puts a loso they would most likely find the truest articles to defend their point 

 

• Stranded Workers in Doha- I picked this resource because the person who wrote it interviewed the workers directly and went to the camps himself so he had a firsthand look at the situation. He also quoted the workers and they would probably be the best source since they are experiencing everything we are talking about directly. Also, this article had a lot of the same information I found in other places. 

 

4.    List information that you get.

 

    1.   Al Jazeera:

• Most workers from Pakistan, India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Phillipines, and Bangledash
• earn between $5 and $7 a day
• passports are taken from them when they arrive so they can't leave
• they take a loan of $12,000-$25,000 to come over here and they can't usually pay it back
• many are illeterate
• most don't understand all of the details of the loans they are taking
• they are usually promised more money than they really end up getting
• there are a lot of suicide cases- the Indian embassy recorded 109 suicides of Indians in the UAE in 2006
• there are about 10,000,000 labourers in the gulf
• they work in up to 50 degrees celcius and risk injury or even death
• they live in poor, cramped and crowded living conditions- some don't have food, water or electricity
• they came over to the gulf because they thought they would become rich
• some aren't paid at all
• AMBE is one of the companies that transports workers over here- it is based in India
• AMBE charges more money to bring the workers over here than it costs- they get a 40% profit
• the charge to comeover is about $1600
• they work to provide for their families
• there are many industrial accidents but they are not always recorded
• the bigest worker camp in the gulf holds over 100,000 workers
• it isn't sanitary, there are no proper bathrooms or kitchens
• 6 people in each 10ft x 10ft room
• recently they have been trying to make labour laws more fair but it hasn't made any huge improvements yet 

 

   2.  The Peninsula:

• Qatar, Nepal sign additional labour protocol-
• There are around 266,000 Nepalese workers in Qatar, according to official estimates available in Kathmandu, a source at the Nepalese embassy here said yesterday. 
• Most of the workers are employed in the booming yet unorganized construction and contracting sectors
• Kerala-based manpower agencies duped us: Labourers 
• Workers on verge of nervous breakdown 
• ‘Abused’ maid jumps from first floor in escape bid
• Residents shocked by squalid state of Industrial Area
• Workers languishing in labour camps 

 

    3.  Qatar Labor Law:

• Qatar's labor force consists primarily of expatriate workers
• The largest group of foreign workers comes from South Asia
• In May 2004, Qatari passed a new labor law which allows Qatari workers to right to strike
• There is no minimum wage regulation
• It is common practice in Qatar for expatriate workers to be provided accommodation, end of service benefits and homeward passage allowance, in addition to salaries

 

    4.   Wikipedia:

•  Forced labor-
•  According to the US State Department's Trafficking in Persons Report, men and women who are lured into Qatar by promises of high wages are often forced into underpaid labor
•  The report states that Qatari laws against forced labor are rarely enforced

 

    5.   Qatar Sux:

• Among the Nepali overseas workers who went to gulf countries to build their future, more than five hundred died in the year 2007 alone

• Most of the deaths occured in traffic acidents, due to work place hazards, heart attacks or by committing suicide, rather than natural causes

• The deaths mostly occurred in Saudi Arabia, Qatar and United Arab Emirates (UAE)

• The Riyadh based Nepali Embassy has said that last year 301 Nepalis died in Saudi Arabia which has more than 200,000 Nepalis working in various sectors in mostly semi-skilled jobs.
• According to it, only 49 percent of them died due to natural causes while 28 percent died in road accidents, 13 percent while doing work involving risks and 10 percent through suicide.
• 153 Nepali workers died in Qatar which has the largest concentration of Nepalis workers in the gulf region, near about 266,000.
• According to Ram Kaji Khadka, deputy chief of Nepali mission in Doha, among the Nepali workers who have died in Qatar, 66 percent died due to heart attack. Only five percent died due to natural causes in Qatar.
• 49 Nepali workers died in United Arab Emirates (UAE) last year which has more than 80,000 Nepalis employed in mostly manual jobs.

 

    6.   National Geographic:

• How We Can End Slavery -By Kevin Bales: 
• With 27 million people in slavery today, how can we ever hope to eradicate this horror?
• largest number of slaves alive at any time in human history, they are also the smallest proportion of the world population to ever be held in slavery
• Today the slaveholders are weaker than they have ever been, and there is universal agreement that slavery must end

• To bring people to freedom and to end slavery, three things have to happen:

   

   

  1. Public awareness has to grow, and there has to be public agreement that it is time to end slavery once and for all. This public commitment must be communicated to  politicians.

  2. Money needs to be spent to eradicate slavery, but not nearly as much as you might think. For the price of a bomber or a battleship, the amount of slavery in the world could be dramatically reduced.

  3. Governments must enforce their own anti-slavery laws. To make this happen every country has to understand that they must take action or face serious pressure. We all know about the United Nations weapons inspectors, who enforce the Conventions against Weapons of Mass Destruction, but where are the United Nations Slavery Inspectors? When the same effort is put behind searching out and ending slavery, there will be rapid change.

• Slaves everywhere outnumber their masters.
• 21st -Century Slavery Exposed by Photographer:
• an estimated 27 million people around the world are enslaved—people trapped, controlled by violence, paid nothing, and exploited for labor
• women sold and traded for sexual exploitation.
• children toiling in factories to pay off their parents' unending debts.
• migrants tricked into trading years of farm or domestic labor in exchange for transport across the U.S. border.
• slavery is illegal in every country but is practiced at some level, in some form, just about everywhere around the world
• the most common form of servitude today is debt slavery, in which a person becomes held as a laborer on a farm, or as prostitute in a brothel, or as worker on a factory floor after accepting a loan, or transport, or another form of assistance from a "lender."  

• The lender is a slave owner or trafficker, often tricking laborers into working for little or no pay, making it impossible for them to escape their condition

 

    7.   Stranded Workers in Doha:

• Stranded workers are workers whose sponsors (i.e., employers) have abandoned them in one way or another   
• workers who have been abandoned by their employers are not just unemployed; they also become illegal immigrants
• They can't legally get new jobs, and technically shouldn't still be in the country
• even if they want to leave, they can't get an exit visa, let alone afford to fly home
•  Mitery Kunja is a safe house for stranded workers
• Mitery Kunja currently houses about 70 men, mostly Nepalese
• can hold up to 200 men
• Currently it has only two toilets
• Until recently they didn't even have the refrigerator
• Some are there for only a week or two while their embassy sorts out how to get them home; others have been there since it opened in the fall.
• there is a labor camp in the Industrial Area, where hundreds of workers were still living after their sponsor abandoned them
• They were brought over on two-year contracts to do Asian-Games-related construction, but two months ago their sponsor stopped paying them, then moved offices, and now is nowhere to be found
• Hundreds of workers are still in the labor camp, but with no work, no way of getting food, and now no electricity either
• They had been promised a starting salary of 550 riyals ($150) a month, which is typical for construction workers, but with pay raises every few months, first to QR750 and eventually to QR950 ($260).
• low-skilled laborers typically have to pay agents between $1000 and $2000 to come to Qatar
• Their whole extended families go into serious debt to send them over here, on the assumption that two years of salary remittances will pay off the debt and then allow the family to better itself
• many were desperate to find work at the promised salary, in order to pay of their debt of coming to Qatar. Others were so entirely fed up with the Gulf they just wanted to go home, even though it meant returning to worse poverty than they were trying to escape by coming here in the first place
   
   

    8.  Gulf Times 

• Workers say QR15 hike hard to digest

 

 

5.    Select the best information.

 

      Question 1-Why do so many workers come over to the Gulf to work? What are the benefits of being here? Are there any?

• They were brought over on two-year contracts to do Asian-Games-related construction, but two months ago their sponsor stopped paying them, then moved offices, and now is nowhere to be found
• passports are taken from them when they arrive so they can't leave
• they take a loan of $12,000-$25,000 to come over here and they can't usually pay it back 
• most don't understand all of the details of the loans they are taking
• they are usually promised more money than they really end up getting
• According to the US State Department's Trafficking in Persons Report, men and women who are lured into Qatar by promises of high wages are often forced into underpaid labor
• Their whole extended families go into serious debt to send them over here, on the assumption that two years of salary remittances will pay off the debt and then allow the family to better itself
• they came over to the gulf because they thought they would become rich
• some aren't paid at all
• Many of the Indian labourers , who had turned up at an Open House organised by Indian Embassy here yesterday, were allegedly duped by the Kerala-based manpower agencies in India.  
• Sooraj, a victim who had paid Rs65,000 to the Kochi-based "Bee Pee Tours and Travels", along with his four friends, told The Peninsula that the company had promised them a monthly salary of QR950 plus medical allowance, annual bonus, food and accommodation. However, contrary to the promises, he and his friends were given only QR800. Again QR150 was deducted from this amount against what the company claimed as visa fee.
• "We were not told that they would dedcut the visa fee from the salary. But every month QR150 is being deducted. They have not even stamped our visas till date", he said.
• He said he is repenting having quit a good job in the Indian defence ministry. "The dream of a Gulf job and making petro-dollars has ruined my life and compromised the future of my family." He has a wife two children. 

   

   

      Question 2-How many workers are in each of the Gulf countries? What is the ratio of workers to high class people?

• there are about 10,000,000 labourers in the gulf
• There are around 266,000 Nepalese workers in Qatarthe bigest worker camp in the gulf holds over 100,000 workers 
• Qatar's labor force consists primarily of expatriate workers

• There is an estimated 10,000 Nepalis women workers in Saudi Arabia alone
• 49 Nepali workers died in United Arab Emirates (UAE) last year which has more than 80,000 Nepalis employed in mostly manual jobs.

 

 

       Question 3-What kind of education do the workers have?

 

 

       Question 4-What is being done today to end slavery/ low paid labor? What more needs to be done?

• largest number of slaves alive at any time in human history, they are also the smallest proportion of the world population to ever be held in slavery
• Today the slaveholders are weaker than they have ever been, and there is universal agreement that slavery must end

• To bring people to freedom and to end slavery, three things have to happen:  

  1. Public awareness has to grow, and there has to be public agreement that it is time to end slavery once and for all. This public commitment must be communicated to  politicians.

  2. Money needs to be spent to eradicate slavery, but not nearly as much as you might think. For the price of a bomber or a battleship, the amount of slavery in the world could be dramatically reduced.

  3. Governments must enforce their own anti-slavery laws. To make this happen every country has to understand that they must take action or face serious pressure. We all know about the United Nations weapons inspectors, who enforce the Conventions against Weapons of Mass Destruction, but where are the United Nations Slavery Inspectors? When the same effort is put behind searching out and ending slavery, there will be rapid change.

• Slaves everywhere outnumber their masters.
• an estimated 27 million people around the world are enslaved—people trapped, controlled by violence, paid nothing, and exploited for labor

 

 

       Question 5-What conditions do they live in?

• Poor roads, lack of proper sanitation, several workers cooped up in tiny rooms without proper ventilation and the complete absence of healthcare facilities have made life a living hell for labourers in the industrial area
• Studies have shown that over 80 percent of the homes in the labour area are in need of urgent repairs.
•  they work in up to 50 degrees celcius and risk injury or even death
• they live in poor, cramped and crowded living conditions- some don't have food, water or electricity
• it isn't sanitary, there are no proper bathrooms or kitchens
• 6 people in each 10ft x 10ft room
• Three of the workers alleged that they joined the company three years ago and are living and working in “horrible” conditions. They have had no work for the past 35 days and hence are sitting idle in their labour lodgings at the Industrial Area. 
• All in the group of 15 said they had not been paid salaries for the past five months and so are struggling to have two square meals a day. “We have no money and work. We are tired of braving starvation and insults. We beg you to send us back,” one of the workers, Samuel Thomas, said. “It’s been three long years of torture and tension. We have not been sending any money home, so our families are suffering. All we want now is to go back home, no matter if we starve there,” he said.   
• Adding to their cup of woe is the abject living conditions in the labour camp. One cannot enter the camp due to the stench emanating from inside. Cramped and unhygienic living conditions and abject neglect of safety regulations were evident. Filth and rubbish have piled up all around
• Workers said the manhole was overflowing for three days, until some one came and pumped it out on Sunday.
• Eight workers are huddled in an 8 ft x 8 ft room, which has a lone bathroom. The kitchen has leaky pipes, a rusted sink and poor drainage facilities. 

 

 

6.    Write what made you determine what was useful and what wasn’t.

 

             To pick which information I was going to keep and which I wasn't, I looked at my questions and looked for information that had to do with them. If it didn't have to do with them then I took it out, unless I thought it would make my project more powerful. Then I compared my information and picked mostly things that were said in multiple places and were from the most reliable sources, because then they were more likely to be true. Finally, I looked through what information was left and decided whether or not it would be good information for a poem that is what I put as the best information.  

 

 

7.    Write a poem using the information you found.

 

 

8.    Evaluate whether or not the information in your poem had an impact on the readers.

 

 

9.  Defend your resources.