Summary: Yasin Kakande is the guest this week on the Zero Squared podcast. Kakande is a former journalist for the newspaper the National out of Dubai, a news producer for City 7 TV in Dubai, and a former reporter and assistant editor for the Bahrain Tribune. His book Slave States is out from Zero Books this month. It is an exposé of the Kafala system. Kafala is a sponsorship system used to monitor migrant workers in the Gulf Arab Region. Kafala requires that a migrant worker's employer acts as his or her sponsor. It puts the employer in charge of most aspects of a migrant workers life. The human rights organization Amnesty International has documented many human rights abuses by Kafala employers. At a FIFA hearing in July of this year, AIUSA Advocacy Director Sunjeev Bery testified against Kafala. He reported that "The Kafala sponsorship system is a recipe for worker abuse." The concern was raised in regards to the migrant workers preparing for the FIFA World Cup in 2022. Bery said that "As a first step, Qatar must abolish the inherently abusive policies that give employers the power to decide whether a worker can leave the country or take another job." The Skype connection this interview with Yasin Kakande was particularly poor and in order to compensate for this we've narrated over many of Kakande's answers in order to make sure that both his voice and ideas can be heard. In this episode you'll hear a clip from Sam Cooke's hit Chain Gang, clips from the BBC and MSNBC on the subject of Qatar and the Kafala system, an excerpt from the Frontline documentary Dubai's Night Secrets: Prostitution and Sex Trafficking in Dubai, and Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.
