Deadly fire exposes the plight of low-paid migrants in wealthy Kuwait

Kuwait City: On a recent summer day in Kuwait, as the temperature soared above 110 degrees, four Indian migrant workers stood by the side of a road with their belongings stuffed into bags.

Suresh Kumar, 52, and his roommates had just been evicted as authorities swept their neighborhood for building code violations after a fatal fire in June that killed 49 migrant workers, the vast majority of whom were Indian.

The four men said they had shared a 172-square-foot room on the ground floor of an apartment building, but inhabiting the ground floor is prohibited, so the owner was demolishing the room.

Now they were homeless, and unsure of where to go.

Kuwait, perched on the Persian Gulf, is one of the richest countries in the world, with a $980 billion sovereign fund built on oil revenue. But little of that wealth is enjoyed by migrant workers like Kumar and his roommates, who often struggle with inadequate housing and low wages, and who have limited power to seek recourse.

Kumar and his roommates were all construction workers subcontracted on projects for Kuwait's state oil firm and refining company, and they said they could afford to pay only about $325 in rent between the four of them. Because a whole apartment would cost more than twice that amount, they were resigned to finding themselves another room to share, with no guarantee that it would be any safer or more comfortable than their old home.

The high death toll from the fire in June -- which engulfed a seven-story building where nearly 200 migrant workers lived -- shocked people across Kuwait. In the weeks after the tragedy, it spurred an unusually public reckoning over unsafe housing for migrant workers, as inspectors fanned out to issue building code violations.

But that response stopped short of addressing the structural issues that afflict migrant workers in Kuwait and other Gulf countries, human rights activists say. In some cases, the government's reaction punished the migrants themselves -- evicting them from their homes and leaving them in fear of deportation. After the fire, Kuwait's Interior Ministry said an unspecified number of visa violators in workers' housing had been arrested.

"It's a perfect tragic example of how migrant workers are noticed only when there is some kind of catastrophe," said James Lynch, a director of FairSquare, a London-based research group that investigates rights abuses. "Nobody was thinking about worker housing in Kuwait until this happened -- until it made the government look really bad."

The insecurity that migrant workers face, combined with limited political freedoms and labor organizing rights, means that it is rare for them to publicly complain or push for change.

Kuwait's Public Authority for Manpower, which oversees labor affairs, did not respond to a request for comment, nor did Kuwait Oil Co. or Kuwait National Petroleum Co. -- the companies that Kumar and his roommates said they worked for, via third-party contractors.

After the fire, The New York Times interviewed 18 migrant workers in Kuwait about their living conditions; many spoke on the condition of partial anonymity because they feared retribution.

Several of them described Kuwaiti authorities cracking down on building code violations, ordering people to leave their homes with minimal notice.

Employers in Kuwait are obligated to provide accommodations, but many of the workers said they had been left to find their own. Rashid and Rahmat, Pakistani workers who declined to give their last names, described going from building to building on foot to ask about vacancies. The biggest struggle, they said, is finding a space they can afford.

At the heart of the problem, according to migrant rights activists and scholars, is a system governing foreign labor in the Gulf called "kafala" -- which binds workers to their employers -- as well as the power imbalances faced by migrants who flock to the Gulf from poorer nations across Asia and Africa to earn higher wages than they could back home.

"These workers are disposable in nature," said Manishankar Prasad, an independent labor researcher in Malaysia, describing the kafala system.

Prasad, an Indian national who grew up in the Gulf, said he was "infuriated" as he followed the news of the fire, watching the names of the dead trickle out on social media.

Foreign residents make up more than two-thirds of Kuwait's population of 4 million; that ratio is even higher in nearby Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. Many work in office jobs, but across the Gulf, lower-income migrants perform essential work as street cleaners, truck drivers, construction workers, child-care providers, cashiers and more.

"There is no incentive for anybody to change the system," Prasad said. "Because for each worker who is killed, there are 10 other people who'll replace them within a day."

The fire began in the early morning of June 12 in Mangaf, an area near Kuwait City where many migrants live. Survivors interviewed by the Times said they awoke to screams and found thick black smoke filling the building's corridors.

Building codes in Gulf countries are often laxly enforced, and smoke detectors and fire escapes are not common in residential properties. In addition to the 49 people killed, more than 50 people were injured.

Kuwait's firefighting force said that the blaze had been caused by an electrical short circuit, and that it had started in a guard's room on the ground floor.

Visiting the scene of the fire, Sheikh Fahad Yusuf Al Sabah -- Kuwait's deputy prime minister -- blamed "the greed of property owners" and said the owner of the company employing the workers would be detained. Soon after, Noura Al Mashaan, Kuwait's public works minister, said authorities would start tackling building code violations.

Kuwaiti regulations specify that no more than four workers be housed in a room and set minimum space requirements per person. Rooms must be well ventilated and employers must provide air conditioning as well as at least one toilet for every eight workers.

Depak Pasma, 24, from Nepal, said that his housing in Mangaf was provided by his company, with four people sharing an air-conditioned room that he described as large.

But many other workers said their reality was very different. Some described cramming six people into tiny rooms inside illegally subdivided apartments. Several said they lived in buildings with ground-floor apartments that were now being torn down.

"We have been living in this building for years and nobody said anything," said Sayed Abu Khalid, a 58-year-old supermarket worker from Egypt. "After what happened in Mangaf they want us to move out of the ground floor."

Abu Khalid said he lives in a two-bedroom apartment that houses eight people.

The building owner plans to demolish their apartment, and the tenants hope to move into a vacant apartment upstairs.

Combined, the eight roommates pay nearly $1,000 in monthly rent to a sublessor, who then pays about $800 to the apartment's owner and pockets the difference, Abu Khalid said.

Profit-making middlemen are built into the perilous system that migrant workers must navigate. Their troubles sometimes begin in their home countries, with predatory recruiters and loan sharks who leave them in debt before they start working.

After they arrive in the Gulf, they are often employed by third-party contractors, who sponsor their visas and house them while they perform jobs for other companies.

The workers who died in the fire were employed by a third-party contractor called NBTC Group. In a statement, the company said it was "greatly shocked and saddened" by the tragedy, and promised to pay nearly $10,000 to the families of workers killed, saying it was ready to "render the fullest assistance."

Similar third-party arrangements are common in Gulf countries, allowing the workers' ultimate employers to outsource the tasks of hiring and housing migrant workers.

"It's a convenient dumping of risk and responsibility onto the private sector," said Lynch of FairSquare.

NBTC Group works across the Gulf in construction and engineering, logistics and other fields. In Kuwait, according to its website, it has been subcontracted by firms including Kuwait Oil, Kuwait National Petroleum and the US Army Corps of Engineers.

The US Army Corps of Engineers said in a statement to the Times that it was "committed to the well-being" of workers and that it had "tools in place to ensure companies we contract with are complying with federal requirements, such as routine site inspections and interviews with contractor personnel."

Gulf countries' economic models rely on cheap foreign labor, and inadequate housing is often the result of cost-cutting, Lynch said. But, he added, blaming the private sector "is missing a key part of what is going on here -- which is the failure of the state to live up to its own obligation."