The latest major labor strike in the Gulf tore through Sharjah on March 18, 2008. At a maintenance company 1,500 migrant workers burned busses and cars, and smashed up the company’s administration office. Some of the workers told Gulf News they were rioting over low and unpaid wages. Riot police were called in, and the unrest eventually quelled.
These scenes have become common events in the Gulf. In February and March of this year, Dubai and Bahrain saw strikes that halted construction on billion dollar projects. In perhaps the most high profile strike just a few months earlier, in October 2007 thousands of workers on the Burj Dubai, soon to be the tallest building in the world, went on strike, then rioted, destroying the site office of Dubai construction firm Emaar. Like all GCC countries, the UAE and Bahrain prohibit labor unions. Strikes are legal in Bahrain, but prohibited in Dubai. The emirate later deported 4,000 striking workers back to their home countries. Bahrain initially had announced similar action but later retreated from threats to deport its striking workers.
These strikes have occurred for various reasons. Over the past two years, human rights organizations have documented some of the more horrific conditions workers endure in the six GCC states. Poor housing conditions, unsafe worksites, unpaid overtime, shifty middlemen overcharging workers for visas and travel, and long working hours in the searing summer heat have become acknowledged problems.
And as the Gulf has come under more scrutiny — including receiving the worst possible ranking in the US State Department’s 2005 Trafficking in Persons Report — some countries have tried to change their images, and even their policies.
Conditions of migrant workers
Population statistics for the GCC are notoriously unreliable, perhaps because the foreign labor population is breathtaking. According to United Nations figures from 2006, there are an estimated 12 million foreign workers in the GCC — around 30% of the total population. Around 8.4 million of those workers come from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and the Philippines. The majority fill the menial tasks of everyday life that keeps the Gulf functioning: construction workers, maids, nannies and the service industry. And according to analysts like Nisha Varia of Human Rights Watch, the GCC countries do not appreciate their work.
“One of the issues is that despite all the benefit they’re getting from these workers, they haven’t extended adequate protections to them,” she said.
One of the workers is Sakamilee Nam, a 22-year-old construction worker from Pakistan. He lives in a room with six other men in a labor camp outside Dubai. Nam says as soon as he arrived in the UAE, his boss took away his passport to make sure he stayed on the job. Nam is not happy about it.
“If we don’t like things here, and want to go back home, then it’s going to be very difficult for us,” he said. “This is not right. Our passport should be with us.”
In fact, Human Rights Watch’s Varia pointed out that confiscating workers’ passports is illegal. However, like many labor laws in the GCC, the law prohibiting employers from keeping employee passports is not enforced. According to her, this is just one of the negative aspects of the Gulf’s notorious system of “sponsorship”. Under this system, individual employers “sponsor” migrants’ work visas, which mean workers cannot switch jobs, even if the employer is abusive or irresponsible.
Another problem is that recruiters charge high initial fees that then need to be paid back, over a long period of time. Pakistani worker Mohammed Youngeer earns about $270 a month. But it will take a long time for his family to see any of that money. Like many others, Youngeer had to borrow about $2,500 to pay a Pakistani employment agency to get him a job in Dubai. It essentially makes him an indentured servant for a year, or more.
“We’ll work hard here now for one whole year at least to recover that money and send it back home,” Youngeer said. “After that, what we do here, will probably count as profit, but for one year we are working to only pay off that money.”
However, Emirati officials say the treatment of migrant workers has improved.
“We are concerned with the protection of worker while they are here,” said Alex Zalami, an advisor to the UAE Labor Minister. “We provide better housing than before, better health insurance than before, and better safety conditions than before.”
Changes since 2006
After the State Department’s 2005 Trafficking in Human Persons Report, and a Human Rights Watch report called “Building Towers, Cheating Workers” in 2006, the UAE, and specifically Dubai, became one of the first GCC states to begin calling for, and implementing, reforms. By November 2007, the UAE’s labor ministry had set up a special labor court to resolve disputes. The government increased the number of inspectors to examine labor camps and worksites. The emirate also instituted health insurance for workers and developed mechanisms for the collection of unpaid wages.
Other countries are following suit. In November of 2007, India and Qatar signed a “labor protocol” that enacts new rules for the recruitment of Indian domestic workers. It also calls for the formation of two committees, one in each country, which are supposed to meet and discuss labor issues.
Qatar has also announced it will build a $1 billion “labor city” to house 50,000 workers. Near the capital of Doha, the city is slated to include “mosques, playgrounds, cinemas, a mall, motel, sports center, healthcare facilities, and a police and fire station.”
This announcement comes as the UAE continues construction on a series of labor cities within Dubai’s Industrial City development. According to developer Tatweer’s website, the housing will meet all Dubai’s municipal standards, and “providing business owners with affordable, high quality standard accommodation for laborers and supervisors.” The developers plan to house 87,000 workers in seven separate compounds within the confines of the Industrial City development. Rooms will sleep anywhere from one to nine workers, and the compounds will include cafes, health and fitness facilities, banks and other services.
And in January 2008, Abu Dhabi hosted what some hailed as a groundbreaking meeting between ministers from Asian and African countries that supply workers and the Gulf countries that receive them. Called “The Abu Dhabi Dialogue” it was the first time a GCC country hosted labor sending countries for conference specifically addressing workers’ issues.
The meeting was a success: the ministers signed the “Abu Dhabi Declaration”, a general agreement aimed at finding ways to crack down on dubious recruitment practices and employment agencies that take advantage of the sponsorship system. Brunson Mckinley, director general of the International Organization for Migration, said the dialogue indicated that Gulf states are trying to improve conditions.
“They’re all coming in the right direction,” he said. “There is an understanding all around that good treatment of workers is essential, because if they’re not treated right nor paid well, then they simply won’t come anymore. And it’s as simple as that.”
Labor shortage?
Indeed, the Gulf may be facing a huge labor shortage of up to 5 million workers. The reason is that India and other countries sending workers to the Gulf are now themselves booming, and funding their own construction projects.
“The golden days of cheap labor from Asia for the Gulf contractors are gone,” told Abdulmajeed al-Gassab, vice president of the Arabian Gulf Chapter of the Project Management Institute, to Bahrain’s Gulf Daily News in March 2008.
But others doubt that market forces will force the reforms needed to help the millions of vulnerable laborers in the Gulf right now. And Human Rights Watch’s Nisha Varia points out that huge numbers of people in India and Pakistan are continuing to be desperate for work — and thus they will not stop coming any time soon. She agrees, however, that the Abu Dhabi Dialogue, and the Declaration’s proposed reforms are steps in the right direction, yet she thinks the Gulf states need to do a lot more.
“These are really entrenched problems, and they have not gone so far as to protect certain rights, to bargain collectively, to form unions,” she said. “So we’ll see what they do and if action on ground is going to match up to rhetoric.”
As if the existing problems are not enough, now the GCC has to deal with another labor-related problem: as the US dollar plummets, and with it the GCC currencies pegged to it workers are striking more often because compared to the currencies in their countries of origin, their take-home wages are taking a dive. And the high inflation in the booming economies of the Gulf, and especially the UAE, means workers have even less money to send home each month.
In order to compensate for this, the Indian government earlier this year considered imposing a minimum wage on all contracts in Gulf countries. As the first efforts to enforce this new rule came into affect on March 1, 2008, Indian workers in Bahrain began to riot. The government of Bahrain blamed India for the trouble, reasoning that Indians already in the country would not settle for their colleagues being paid more. The Indian government backed down, and no minimum wage rule has been imposed as of yet.
But migrant worker advocate groups say the Gulf governments have a better chance of keeping their workers happy, and in place, if they would legislate a minimum wage for foreign workers, enforce existing labor laws, improve labor courts, and provide migrants with legal aid. They say this would make the Gulf not only one of the fastest developing parts of the world, but also a regional leader in protecting workers’ rights.
