Worker rights issues pose a challenge to Gulf building boom

Labourers work near the Burj Khalifa, the tallest tower in the world. — Photo by Reuters

DUBAI: A strike by thousands of migrant workers at Dubai's biggest builder Arabtec last month may be a harbinger of a new wave of industrial activism that threatens to disrupt the Gulf's latest construction boom.

Gulf nations have relied heavily on the supply of cheap labour from Asia to build their vast housing and infrastructure needs. But their treatment of foreign workers has been criticised repeatedly by rights groups who have demanded that governments repeal oppressive labour laws.

“Any Gulf government that seeks to significantly reform its labour system will face tremendous opposition from its national (employers) who benefit greatly from legal and regulatory shortcomings,” said Nicholas McGeehan, researcher for Qatar, the UAE and Bahrain at Human Rights Watch, a US-based non-governmental research and rights advocacy group.

“This problem is eminently fixable, but as yet no Gulf States have shown the necessary political will and the exploitation of migrant workers is as bad as ever,” he said.

Most blue collar workers in the Gulf Arab states are migrant labourers hired on a contract basis from South Asian countries such as India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal, who have come to the Middle East to escape abject poverty in their home country.

Typically employed on low wages, workers are usually housed in camps with basic facilities on the outskirts of cities. They are tied to a Kafala or sponsorship-based employment system which binds them to one employer, and the workers pay heavy recruitment fees to agents, leaving many in debt even before they start work.

The lack of workers’ rights coupled with low wage growth is now starting to make the Gulf less attractive to workers from South Asia and elsewhere. That is adding to a labour shortage that could jeopardise Gulf States' ambitions to host world events, including Dubai's bid to host the World Expo in 2020, which governments consider vital to their ambitions to be seen as global cities.

Qatar's preparations to host the soccer World Cup in 2022 are throwing the spotlight on working conditions there. At the FIFA Congress in the Maldives on Saturday, representatives from the International Trade Union Confederation staged a demonstration criticising the lack of worker rights in Qatar and calling for a re-run of the World Cup bidding process.

Strikes by foreign workers are illegal across the Gulf although protests are more common in Kuwait among public sector workers. Last month more than 1,000 workers at the state-run Oil Sector Services Co. went on strike demanding better pay.

At Arabtec in Dubai last month the workers downed tools illegally to call for a wage hike of around $50 a month but their demand was eventually refused. About 200 who went on strike left the state after the stoppage of their own accord, police officials said last week. Local media reports, however, said more than 400 workers returned to their home countries.

No wage growth

Wage demands are starting to echo a previous building boom in the Gulf in 2006-07 before the global financial crisis and Dubai's property market collapse.

Hundreds of thousands of construction workers protested in Dubai in 2006-07, sometimes violently, against living conditions and delayed wage payments. The unrest spurred a wave of labour reforms in the UAE, including a wage protection system to ensure salaries are paid on time and the introduction of a three-hour work break during peak summer months.

However, the government ignored calls for minimum wage laws and workers' salaries remained largely unchanged. The sponsorship system also continued and there has been no move to legalise unions.

Human rights groups say governments need to abolish the sponsorship system to allow workers to switch employers, introduce minimum wages, improve workers' living conditions and allow unions and peaceful protests.

In 2011, more than 130 artists said they would boycott a branch of New York's Guggenheim museum in Abu Dhabi, which is being built on Saadiyat Island, due to what they said was exploitation of foreign workers. Arabtec is building a branch of Paris's Louvre museum on the island.

Despite the global attention unrest is often suppressed.

Gulf authorities are even more wary of protests after the Arab Spring, which toppled rulers in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and Yemen and threatened many others.

The oil-rich nations of the Gulf have been appeasing their citizens by doling out free housing, employment and even waiving loans.

The disparity in wages between local citizens and migrant workers is widening.

Mohammed Jindran, managing director of Overseas Labour Supply, a recruitment firm in the UAE, which has about four million migrant workers, says unskilled workers in the UAE earn on average around 750 dirhams ($200) a month, the same rate as six years ago. Skilled workers' wages are above 900 dirhams.

"Companies have not increased wages. We are feeling the bite while recruiting ... no workers are willing to come to the Gulf on the salaries offered here," said Jindran.

Source: Reuters