By IANS,
Dubai : Over 100 expatriate workers in Qatar, most of them Indians, have gone on strike alleging non-payment of salaries from the company they work for.
Workers in two labour accommodation camps of the company have halted work demanding their salary arrears for two months, the Gulf Times reported. The company’s managing director, says the report, hails from Kozhikode district in Kerala.
The workers allege they had been going without food for the last two days as nearby groceries have stopped supplying them with their provisions pending payment of outstanding bills.
“We have not received salaries for more than two months and are in no position to settle our grocery bills,” a worker, who identified himself as a neighbour of the company’s managing director back in Kerala, was quoted as saying.
Another worker claimed that each of the workers recruited had paid Rs.70,000 to Rs.100,000 to the father of the company’s managing director in Kerala prior to receiving their visas.
In all, the company has about 145 workers in both the camps. They are now planning to approach the Indian embassy in Doha to lodge their protest.
This strike comes close on the heels of a case in which over 100 Indian workers had to return to India from Qatar after the company that hired them lost a major contract.
The workers, most of them skilled, were made to do unskilled labourers’ work after the company could not provide them the jobs they had been recruited for.
Meanwhile, the Indian embassy in Qatar has called upon Indian workers seeking employment in that country to check the antecedents of the company before taking up a job.
“The Qatar government insists that a certain format should be kept for the contracts. Most contracts will be full of grammatical mistakes and they (the workers) come with really a piece of paper without any value or power,” George Joseph, India’s ambassador to Qatar, told the media.