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24/11/2006
As the United Arab Emirates experiences one of the world’s largest construction booms, its government has failed to stop employers from seriously abusing the rights of the country’s half million migrant construction workers, Human Rights Watch said in a report recently released.
Based on extensive interviews with workers, government officials and business representatives, the 71-page report, “Building Towers, Cheating Workers,” documents serious abuses of construction workers by employers in the UAE.
These abuses include unpaid or extremely low wages, several years of indebtedness to recruitment agencies for fees that UAE law says only employers should pay, the withholding of employees’ passports, and hazardous working conditions that result in apparently high rates of death and injury.
The UAE is currently undergoing a dramatic construction boom, and nearly all of the more than 500,000 construction workers in the country are migrants, mostly from South Asian countries such as India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. The country’s 2,738,000 migrant workers make up 95% of the country’s workforce.
Employers based in the UAE import foreign construction workers through recruiting agencies located both inside and outside of the UAE. Recruiting agencies unlawfully force workers, rather than their employers, to pay US$2,000-3,000 for travel, visas, government fees and the recruiters’ own services. To pay these fees, all of the 60 workers interviewed by Human Rights Watch reported that they had accepted loans from their recruiting agents at steep monthly interest rates as high as 10%. As a result, workers start out burdened with huge debts and use the most of their meager wages to repay these loans during the first two to three years of their employment.
Human Rights Watch found that employers routinely withhold construction workers’ wages for a minimum of two months along with their passports, as “security” to keep them from quitting. The report also documented cases where employers have withheld wages for even more extended periods. Workers are desperate for their wages, but are trapped due to their debts; and UAE law prohibits a worker from obtaining a new job without their old employer’s consent. While the government in many cases has forced companies to pay back wages, there is no public record of a single case where it has penalized an employer with fines or imprisonment for failing to pay wages, or any other breaches of the labor law.
The wages of construction workers, which range from $106 to $250 per month, contrast starkly with the national average wage of $2,106 per month. Many recent workers’ protests have centered on demands for better wages. Although the UAE Labor Law of 1980 requires the government to implement a minimum wage, it has failed to do so for the past 26 years.
Hundreds of migrant construction workers die each year in the UAE under unexplained circumstances. The government can account only for a few of these deaths, primarily because it appears not to enforce its own laws requiring employers to report worksite deaths and injuries. In 2004 alone, the embassies of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh returned the bodies of 880 construction workers back to their home countries. Yet the Dubai emirate, the only emirate to keep a count of migrant worker deaths, recorded only 34 construction deaths that year, based on reports from only six companies. An official at the Indian consulate in Dubai told Human Rights Watch that it has registered 971 death cases in 2005, of which 61 are registered as site accidents.
The government does not allow workers to form organizations or trade unions. As a result, there are no institutional mechanisms for advocating on behalf of workers’ rights. During the past two years, thousands of migrant construction workers have resorted to public demonstrations. In March, the government promised to legalize trade unions by the end of the year, but instead, in September it passed a new law banning labor strikes and announcing that it would deport striking workers.
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