QU's SESRI announces results of Guest Workers’ Welfare Index
The Social and Economic Survey Research Institute (SESRI) at Qatar University held an event yesterday to present the results from the second wave of the Guest Workers’ Welfare Index (GWWI). The index is used to measure and track the welfare of blue-collar guest workers in Qatar. Attendees of the event included Dr. Hassan Al-Derham, President of Qatar University, Dr. Hassan Al-Sayed, Director of SESRI, and representatives of the Ministry of Administrative Development, Labour and Social Affairs as well as other distinguished guests from government, non-governmental and private sector organizations.
The results of the GWWI wave 2 were based on a nationally representative survey of blue-collar guest workers conducted during April 2018. The survey assessed several aspects of working and living conditions of these workers, including safety and security at working sites and living compounds, human rights and labor rights, finance and remittances, as well as treatment by their employers.
The welfare of migrant laborers around the world has received significant attention from the global media and scholarly community. In the Gulf, attention has been directed towards Qatar mostly due to the FIFA 2022 World Cup. However, much of the public discussion of the problems has not been based on unbiased, quantitative and qualitative measurements that can be generalized to the overall migrant labor population. Reliable data is needed to properly assess the issues surrounding worker welfare in aggregate, to identify domains where welfare is lower or higher, and ultimately, to address those issues in most need of improvement.
The 2018 Guest Workers’ Welfare Index (GWWI) is based on results from a nationally-representative survey conducted with 1,028 blue-collar guest workers in Qatar, and which will be continued annually. The largest group of respondents came from India (29%), followed by Nepal (28%), Bangladesh (17%), Pakistan (9%), Egypt (6%), Sri Lanka (4%), Philippines (3%), and other countries (4%).
The 2018 Guest Workers’ Welfare Index (GWWI) is evaluated at 81 out of 100, an increase from the 2017 rating (score: 75). The overall score is a composite measure of the six different factors or sub-indices that compose the index and which are rated on the same scale from 0 to 100:
Mental Health : 87
Physical Health : 84
Living Conditions : 79
Working Conditions : 85
Contracts : 71
Satisfaction : 79
Rating of the overall Guest Workers’ Welfare Index (GWWI) has increased from 75 in 2017 to 81 in 2018, indicating improvement in the overall welfare of guest workers. The 2017 Index represented a baseline and marked the beginning of an effort to assess and track the welfare of guest workers in Qatar.
The sub-indices that improved the most since 2017 include contracts, working conditions, and satisfaction with different aspects of working and living conditions. These ratings suggest that further improvement in the overall welfare of guest workers requires continuous efforts in informing workers about their rights, easing their full understanding of their contracts, and fully honoring their contracts. Going forward, SESRI is conducting the third annual survey of the Guest Worker Welfare Index in May 2019.
A total of 1,028 guest workers residing in collective housing in Qatar completed the survey yielding a response rate of 87 percent and a maximum sampling error of +/- 3.4 percentage points. The calculation of this sampling error takes into account the design effects. The final dataset was weighted to adjust for probability of selection and non-response.
