Why do US universities tolerate debt bondage on their Qatar campuses?

Whatever the rights and wrongs of Texas A&M University’s decision, announced earlier this month, to close its branch campus in Qatar, the development has drawn attention to the situation of the six US universities operating in Qatar’s Education City, including our own institution, Georgetown University.

Our Qatar campus does a lot of good, critically teaching about issues such as democracy and representation; inequality and social justice; colonialism and imperialism; sexism and racism; and civil disobedience and resistance. And Georgetown doesn’t divert any of its own resources; the Qatari government pays all of the lavish, multimillion-dollar campus’ operating expenses, plus a little extra to compensate the university.

But our operation in Doha still comes at a high moral price. The “expatriate” professors and administrators like us are paid upwards of 50 times as much as the more than 100 “migrant labourers” who provide the janitorial, maintenance, security and food services that keep the campus operating. And although these workers provide services exclusively for Georgetown, they are employed by intermediary staffing companies contracted by the Qatari government – they are bestowed, in essence, as a gift to Georgetown, alongside the use of our government-owned building.

Of course, workers are exploited and underpaid in many Western countries. In the US, there are regular reports of abuses and mistreatment of its 12 million migrant labourers, for instance. The UK government has recently criminalised several types of strike action. Nevertheless, working conditions for “migrant labourers” in Qatar are particularly deplorable. Staffing companies scour the world to find its cheapest workers, who borrow more than $1,000 to pay the companies’ “recruitment fees”. They then spend months or years in Qatar paying off those fees, separated from their families for years at a time and living in crowded single-sex dormitories, often with unattractive food and poor facilities. Few are able to limit their work hours to the “standard” 48-hour week; 60 hours plus commuting time (on company buses) is more common. Despite all this work, they are paid only $300 to $500 (£238 to £397) per month.

Migrant labourers recently gained the legal right to quit and go home, but because virtually none of them can afford the return airfare, this concession is empty in practice. Although this form of debt bondage is technically illegal, virtually no legal mechanisms are in place to prevent it.

The workers’ contractual arrangements provide a moral cover for Georgetown, which can deny responsibility for its support staff’s treatment. Nevertheless, the university has regularly intervened on their behalf, repeatedly pressing for better wages and working conditions since it began its Qatar operations in 2005. Indeed, it has shown greater concern for migrant labourers than any other Western institution we know of operating in Qatar. The five other US campuses here – Northwestern, Cornell Medical College, Carnegie Mellon and Virginia Commonwealth, as well as Texas A&M – have remained almost completely silent on the issue of their own worker conditions, and there is no suggestion that Texas A&M’s withdrawal has anything to do with the issue.

However, Georgetown is constantly fighting an uphill battle with the staffing companies, which have enormous leverage to resist pressure to improve wages and working conditions or to divert benefits intended for workers to company profits, and the conditions for its migrant labourers remain only marginally better than those of typical migrant labourers in Qatar. Georgetown has not been able to eliminate debt bondage or to get its labourers a sustained pay increase, while the professors here (who earn upwards of $10,000 a month, some significantly more) have enjoyed regular salary increases.

Does Georgetown owe it to its migrant labourers – not to mention to the labourers of the world more generally – to take a proper stand against debt bondage and exploitative wages? So far, Georgetown’s answer has been “no”. The university continues to fight with staffing companies for marginally better treatment of labour while it quietly tolerates the role the companies play.

To make real progress, that role will probably have to be abolished. If the Qatari government paid Georgetown what it pays these companies, Georgetown could find money in its budget to end debt bondage and pay a living wage to every worker on its campus. If we care enough about the Jesuit commitment to social justice that Georgetown so often professes, we could make this an essential demand in our negotiations for our third 10-year contract to operate in Qatar.

Although redirecting its migrant-staff funding in this way would cost the Qatari government nothing, Georgetown’s administration has been reluctant to demand this reform, presumably assuming that the Qatari government will refuse because it would call attention to how poor working conditions are all across Qatar. But we will not know what the Qatari government will agree to until this demand is made. And, whatever the reasons for it, it may just be that the departure of Texas A&M will increase the remaining US institutions’ leverage.

If the Qatar government refused the demand, Georgetown would have to sacrifice the opportunity to continue doing all the good it does here. And its expatriate professional workers – including the two of us – would lose our highly paid, highly attractive jobs. At the moment, however, it looks like we are going to spend the next 10 years enjoying fancy banquets at our academic events, with food prepared and cleaned up by workers who remain in debt bondage.

Karl Widerquist and Ian Almond are professors at Georgetown University-Qatar, teaching philosophy and comparative literature, respectively.