Toiling in the desert has have become a corporate social responsibility (CSR) issue in the Gulf countries. There are roughly 9 million migrant workers in the Middle East, most of them in the Gulf region. Construction firms sometimes exploit migrant labor from lower-wage economies, but as more companies in the GCC begin adopting CSR principles, this trend could now be changing.
This is nowhere seen as clearly as in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), where after mounting international pressure and incidents on various building sites, a government decree in June 2008 banned outdoor labor between 12:30 pm and 4:30 pm, when temperatures can reach 50 degrees. The ban is welcome, but may be inadequate by itself to address abuses of migrant labor rights. The government might lack the resources to enforce compliance and the powerful construction lobby needs to adopt a more favorable CSR attitude to make such a measure work. The UAE government for its part accused construction companies of an inhuman attitude, and said the practice of forcing laborers to work in the sizzling heat at building sites without shade goes against religious values and societal norms. (The invocation of CSR alongside religion is an interesting phenomenon in the Gulf countries, where Islam is a powerful force in daily life, as well as the formal underpinning of national laws.) For their part, property developers say changes to the law must be reasonable.
For years, the International Labor Organization (ILO), unions, and some Western governments have been applying pressure on the UAE and other Gulf states to comply with internationally recognized laws and improve the conditions of hundreds of thousands of migrant workers, mainly from South Asia, employed in construction. An irony of the UAE success story is that the luxury resorts, shopping malls and gleaming towers are built on the backs of workers labouring under often poor conditions. The booming building industry in the UAE, fuelled by rising oil revenues, is dependent on this cheap migrant labor. Migrant laborers are paid wages often as low as about $100 a month. They live in overcrowded dormitory-style shacks, lack basic facilities, and often work 12-hour shifts under unsafe conditions. Last year, five laborers died when a reinforcement cage supporting a wall at the construction site of the new Dubai airport terminal collapsed. In short, for the past few years, the migrant labor situation in the UAE and the rest of the Gulf was becoming explosive and the migrant labor backlash was growing: In April of this year a mob of Bangladeshi migrant workers in Kuwait stormed and vandalized the Embassy of Bangladesh there to highlight their plight.
Out with the old, in with the new
The problem is that the region’s feudalistic system is at odds with modern labor practices. Gulf economies such as that of the UAE, which are keen to modernize, need to jettison outmoded ways that have given the region a great deal of bad press in recent years. This is where CSR comes in. Important steps have been taken towards heightened social responsibility in Dubai where a couple of dozen firms, some from the construction industry, are already members of the United Nations Global Compact, an international accord designed to promote CSR by combining human rights with business. Additionally, in July of this year a company from Abu Dhabi for the first time joined the UN compact, which bases CSR on 10 universally accepted principles (including labor ones) derived from various treaties.
Another positive development that is promoting awareness of labor issues in the Gulf is increased research on these subjects, including a two-year project to consider how multinationals can limit the exploitation of migrant workers in their supply chains. Announced in July 2008, it is led by US-based Business for Social Responsibility (BSR), which is beginning pilot projects and research studies in Qatar, the UAE, and other countries that supply or receive labor, with the aim of identifying how multinationals should intervene to improve the treatment of migrant workers. BSR, a non-profit network focusing on CSR, launched the initiative to help protect the rights of international labor migrants along global supply chains in South and Southeast Asia, the Gulf States and other regions. Representing the private sector alongside a diverse group of stakeholders, BSR will also issue a trends report that includes initial recommendations for the private sector on protecting the rights of labor migrants.
Movement toward CSR adoption
Trade union activism is also pushing the envelope on labor and CSR, especially by the Building and Wood Workers’ International (BWI) labor organization, which is working to raise the importance of freedom of association in the Gulf region in general and the UAE in particular. For the first time in the Emirates, representatives from employer groups aware of CSR, governments, international trade unions and civil society met in Dubai this summer to discuss ensuring corporate social responsibility in labor management in the construction industry throughout the Gulf region. BWI recognized the positive steps that some GCC countries have taken towards addressing the key points of ILO conventions, and urged other countries in the region to ratify these measures and at the very least implement national legislation in line with international standards so that the right of workers both native and migrant workers are equally protected. In other words, raised awareness of CSR among firms is an important step towards improving the lot of migrants in the Gulf, but moves by government are also necessary.
To that end, officials from labor importing and exporting countries met in Abu Dhabi in January to discuss the regulation of the market for Asian migrants amid growing calls for their protection from abuse. The meeting, co-organized by the International Organization for Migration, included Asian labor-exporting countries that meet under what is known as the Colombo Process to discuss their contract migrant workers. The Abu Dhabi gathering brought together for the first time the 11 Colombo Process states with the six GCC states, Yemen and three additional Asian countries of destination, namely the Korea, Malaysia and Singapore.
The result of all this activity is that there are hopes for better working conditions for migrants in the Gulf states; heightened CSR is part of this trend, but clearly only one piece of the puzzle, which also includes efforts by civil society, governments, unions and international organizations. It will be interesting to watch how this process evolves when summer comes around again and worker tempers flare in the heat. The difference in 2009 of course could be that the building boom in the GCC countries will start to wind down as the world economy goes into recession. Whether or not that happens, however, a lot of migrants will still be in the UAE and neighboring countries over the next few years. With them will come problems and issues to be settled; but the good news is that there is now a growing realization that improved CSR is one of the ways in which the situation of migrants and the state of the economy as a whole can improve and become more sustainable.
Riad al Khouri is co-founder and principal of KryosAdvisors, and senior fellow of the William Davidson Institute of the University of Michigan
