Bahrain Mirror: The Nepali Kathmandu Post newspaper said that although Nepali workers returning home from Bahrain without salary, bonus and other company benefits has been common for years, the issue of wage theft came to the fore after the pandemic.

According to migrant rights activists, wage theft in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and the Emirates can be conceived as an amalgamation of a number of different types of labor rights abuses and occurs when the worker is not paid as per the law.

According to the Pravasi Nepali Coordination Committee (PNCC), a group working for the welfare of migrant workers, 720 cases of wage theft involving Nepalis have been recorded in various labor destinations since the start of the pandemic.

These employers owe the victimized workers around Rs 4 million, according to the committee.

"Although Nepali workers have been facing the issue of non-payment of wages for several years, the pandemic exacerbated the situation," Som Prasad Lamichhane, executive director of the committee, told the Post.

Wage theft includes total or partial non-payment of a worker's remuneration, payment of salaries below the minimum wage, non-payment of overtime, non-payment of contractually owed benefits, the non-negotiated reduction of salaries and retention of dues upon one's contract termination.

As per the committee's statistics, the highest number of wage theft incidents have been reported from Saudi Arabia with 157 Nepalis returning home unpaid, followed by Bahrain (134), Malaysia (58) and the UAE (17).

"But the actual numbers could well be beyond the figures we have compiled from our resources and migrant workers who reached out to us," said Lamichhane. "If a worker suffers wage theft that means the main objective of their decision to migrate is not fulfilled and it can have long-term impacts on them and their families."

When the coronavirus crept into Nepalis' foreign job destinations, tens of thousands of workers, who struggled for their safety and to meet basic needs for several months, were rendered jobless and suffered pay cuts.

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