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CW investigates the plight of hundreds of runaway migrant workers who have spent months, and in some cases years, living rough under the sitten bridge in downtown Jeddah.
If ever the failures of the sponsorship system for migrant workers in the Gulf were glaringly apparent, it is under the Sitten Bridge in the old district of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.
It is beneath this enormous concrete overpass where more than 1000 migrant workers live on the pavement with limited access to basic needs such as food and water, desperately hoping to be deported.
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Some came on pilgrimage to Makkah and stayed to work illegally, but many others were abandoned by their sponsors or fled abusive or non-paying employers.
More than half are men mainly from Pakistan, India, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, who congregate in groups according to nationality. They came to work in the construction industry.
The rest are a mix of Filipino and Indonesian women, who mostly came to work as domestic workers.
They all sit on cardboard sheets huddled up together on one end of the bridge, waiting to be deported. Sudhakaran, a 28 year old Sri Lankan, says he has spent 17 months in Saudi Arabia, 10 of them under the bridge.
He came to work as a construction labourer to support his wife and two young children, but left his sponsor who only paid him US $106 (SR400) a month, less than half of what he had agreed to.
Like many others, he headed to the Sitten Bridge, a place which has become a well known recruiting ground for illegal workers across the kingdom.
There he gets intermittent labouring work and earns a significantly better daily wage, but it is not without its pitfalls and he is still owed two months’ salary with no legal recourse to ensure he is paid.
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