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NY Times, May 19 2014
Workers at N.Y.U.’s Abu Dhabi Site Faced Harsh Conditions
By ARIEL KAMINER and SEAN O’DRISCOLL
ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates — The strike had entered its second day
when construction workers at Labor Camp 42 got word that their bosses
from the BK Gulf corporation had come to negotiate. Mohammed Amir Waheed
Sirkar, an electrician from Bangladesh, scrambled down the stairs to
meet them. But when he got to the courtyard, he saw the truth: It wasn’t
the bosses who had come. It was the police.
They pounded on doors, breaking some down, and hauled dozens of men to
prison. Mr. Sirkar was taken to a Dubai police station, where officers
interrogated him. After a while, new officers arrived. That’s when
things got rough.
“They beat me up,” he said through an Urdu interpreter, “asking me to
confess I was involved in starting the strike.” Others were slapped,
kicked, or beaten with shoes, a special indignity in Arab culture.
After nine days in jail, Mr. Sirkar was deported, as were hundreds of
other workers.
The forceful response was typical for the United Arab Emirates, where
strikes are illegal and labor conditions grim, but most of the men who
went on strike last October were working on a project that originated in
America: a large new campus for New York University.
Facing criticism for venturing into a country where dissent is not
tolerated and labor can resemble indentured servitude, N.Y.U. in 2009
issued a “statement of labor values” that it said would guarantee fair
treatment of workers. But interviews by The New York Times with dozens
of workers who built N.Y.U.’s recently completed campus found that
conditions on the project were often starkly different from the ideal.
Virtually every one said he had to pay recruitment fees of up to a
year’s wages to get his job and had never been reimbursed. N.Y.U.’s list
of labor values said that contractors are supposed to pay back all such
fees. Most of the men described having to work 11 or 12 hours a day, six
or seven days a week, just to earn close to what they had originally
been promised, despite a provision in the labor statement that overtime
should be voluntary.
The men said they were not allowed to hold onto their passports, in
spite of promises to the contrary. And the experiences of the BK Gulf
strikers, a half dozen of whom were reached by The Times in their home
countries, stand in contrast to the standard that all workers should
have the right to redress labor disputes without “harassment,
intimidation, or retaliation.”
Some men lived in squalor, 15 men to a room. The university said there
should be no more than four.
“Not happy,” Munawar, a painter from Bangladesh who only gave one name
declared, speaking in limited English. Back home, he said, they have
lives, families. “Come here,” he concluded, “not happy.”
N.Y.U. Abu Dhabi is a bold undertaking, matching the ambitions of one of
the world’s wealthiest nations with those of America’s largest private
university. It is also one of the most closely watched of a growing
number of experiments in academic globalization. N.Y.U.’s president,
John Sexton, has called the outpost, an entire degree-granting
institution, “an opportunity to transform the university and, frankly,
the world.”
But Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates, is an unlikely
setting for a university built on the American model. Academic freedom
is unheard-of, criticizing government is a crime and an employment
system known as kafala leaves millions of immigrant workers tethered to
the companies that sponsor their visas.
N.Y.U. has said the campus will be built and run as a “cultural free
zone,” where the university’s core values prevail, from the treatment of
workers to the protection of scholarly inquiry. The university says that
its efforts to ensure humane living and working conditions have been
unprecedented.
Told of the laborers’ complaints, officials said they could not vouch
for the treatment of individual construction workers, since they are not
employees of the university but rather of companies that work as
contractors or subcontractors for the government agency overseeing the
project. Those companies are contractually obligated to follow the
statement of labor values.
To help monitor the situation, an engineering firm, Mott MacDonald, has
been on hand to interview workers and prepare annual reports. The
latest, released last month, noted some challenges, including a single
contractor who fell behind on one month’s wages, but concluded, “Over
all, there is strong evidence confirming the N.Y.U.A.D. project is
taking workers’ rights seriously.”
The report made no mention of the BK Gulf strike, or the strikers’
demands for more pay.
Mott MacDonald declined to discuss its report. John Beckman, N.Y.U.’s
chief spokesman, said in a recent email that university officials were
not aware of any unrest and were “working with our partners to have it
investigated.”
Luxury Next Door
N.Y.U. Abu Dhabi rises just to the northeast of the city’s busy
downtown, on a vast sun-baked expanse called Saadiyat Island. The
island, whose name means “happiness” in Arabic, is being developed as a
world-class culture destination, with outposts of the Louvre and the
Guggenheim Museum that, like its neighbor, were paid for by Abu Dhabi’s
ruler, Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed al-Nahyan.
The broad slope of a lacy dome is just now coming into view on the
Louvre’s site. The Guggenheim is still just a building-size hole, with a
skeleton crew of workers pumping out water. But both museum projects
have attracted unwelcome attention from human rights groups. In March,
members of Gulf Labor, a group of artists and writers, unfurled protest
banners in the Guggenheim’s New York home to call attention to working
conditions in Abu Dhabi.
Richard Armstrong, the Guggenheim’s director, said it was committed to
fair labor standards and noted that “the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi is not yet
under construction.”
N.Y.U.’s construction is now complete. When the undergraduate program,
which has so far been operating out of temporary facilities, holds its
first graduation on Sunday at the new campus, former President Bill
Clinton will be on hand to usher N.Y.U. into the next phase of its life
as a “global network university.”
A vast majority of the roughly 6,000 people who built that campus have
been housed in large labor camps. Security guards keep visitors from
entering those camps, but N.Y.U. officials say the conditions there are
excellent, with what are described as “on-site leisure facilities” and
“a wide range of recreational pursuits.”
The company Munawar works for, City Falcon, housed him, along with a few
dozen other laborers, in a small tenement building in the city’s
business district.
Just a few blocks up the street are the modern buildings that have
served as N.Y.U.’s temporary campus; a few blocks in the other direction
is the stunning ultraluxury hotel where the university has staged
cultural events.
Inside City Falcon’s squalid quarters, the bedrooms are so crowded that
the men must sleep three to a stack — one on the upper bunk, one on the
lower bunk and one below the lower bunk, separated from the floor by
only a thin pad for a mattress. In the space between the beds, the men
pile cauliflower, onions and 75-pound sacks of Basmati rice to cook
after working all day and washing the construction dirt from their
clothes. Tangles of exposed wiring hang down from the ceiling, and
cockroaches climb the walls.
In the smaller of the two rooms in this apartment, where the only window
is covered over, more than a dozen men share a space of barely 200
square feet. They drape towels down from the bed above them to eke out a
tiny realm of privacy.
The men who live there, like millions of other South Asian laborers in
Abu Dhabi, came for one reason: to earn money for their families back
home. One City Falcon employee, a soft-spoken man with a boyish face, is
helping support five brothers. Another supports four children, ages 6 to
14. Others have toddlers they have never met.
One painter said he was promised a base pay of 1,500 dirham a month, or
$408. After he arrived, he said, he found out it would be 700 dirham,
about what other Saadiyat Island construction workers have been reported
to make.
Overtime boosts that to 1,000 dirham, or $272. But food costs more than
a third of that. Cellphones, the men’s lifeline to the world they left
behind, take another cut. And the annual raises they were promised have
not materialized. Even working 11 hours a day, six days a week, they
struggle to send home much more than $100 a month.
That is how the numbers work on paper; in reality they are far worse.
Almost all of the several dozen workers interviewed, working for a
variety of companies and living at a half-dozen labor camps, said that a
recruiter back home charged them about a year’s wages to land them the
jobs. (Recruitment fees are widespread in the U.A.E., despite being
officially illegal; Human Rights Watch calls them “the single greatest
factor in creating conditions of forced labor.”)
The City Falcon workers, like all the men interviewed, said they were
not allowed to keep their own passports. A group of laborers in a nearby
apartment who had recently finished installing furniture on the Saadiyat
Island campus said they were not even allowed to hold their own bank
cards. To get cash they have to ask the man they called the “owner”: the
recruiter who brought them over from Bangladesh, who sleeps in the room
with them.
Attempts to reach City Falcon managers were not successful.
BK Gulf, the company whose workers went on strike last October, said it
was “obliged by confidentiality clauses to make no comment whatsoever
without the express permission of our client.” Mubadala, the government
entity overseeing the construction of the N.Y.U. campus, said it would
not comment on any aspect of the project.
Challenging the System
By laying out its standards for labor in a country with no tradition of
workers’ rights, N.Y.U. took on a considerable challenge — one that many
companies in the region are content to ignore. Sustaining the academic
freedom that is a core value of its New York campus will pose a similar
challenge. In both cases, the challenge is made more complex by the fact
that the university is in effect a guest of the ruling family, which has
not only paid for the 21-building campus and for generous tuition
subsidies, but also has contributed the first of what are expected to be
several $50 million donations to N.Y.U. as a whole.
In recent years, the United Arab Emirates, which has been accused of
torturing political prisoners, has intensified its crackdown on dissent.
And though neighboring Qatar, which is preparing for the 2022 World Cup,
recently announced reforms to the kafala system, in U.A.E. it remains
firmly in place.
On some of the labor protections that N.Y.U. set forth, including a ban
on child labor and a requirement that workers get free transportation to
their job sites, The Times’s reporting turned up no violations.
Margaret Bavuso, the executive director of campus operations for N.Y.U.
Abu Dhabi, said she had worked closely with contractors and the
government of Abu Dhabi to ensure better conditions than laborers in the
U.A.E. could otherwise expect. “The government has become much, much
more responsive in the time that we’ve been here,” she said, citing
among other things new rules to ban outdoor work during the hottest
hours of the hottest months.
She is especially proud of the university’s safety record, achieved in
part through a program that rewards workers who notice potential
hazards. According to the university, only one worker has died, and its
accident rate — 0.03 accidents per 100,000 work hours — was far lower
than at other large-scale construction jobs, including Olympic Park in
London, which had a rate of 0.16.
At one of the recent safety awards ceremonies, Ms. Bavuso said, Al
Bloom, the vice chancellor of N.Y.U. Abu Dhabi, addressed thousands of
laborers who had come from countries like India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka,
Bangladesh and Nepal. Ms. Bavuso says he told them: “All of you have
worked so very hard on this project. Your children are benefiting from
the work that you do on this project. There is no reason that those
children, as they get educated in your country, that they can’t apply to
go to school here. And just think about how exciting it would be for
them to attend a school that you built.’ ”
Mr. Beckman, the N.Y.U. spokesman, disputed that some workers are not
paid a living wage. “Wages on the N.Y.U.A.D. project are designed to
place workers at the top of the range in their respective categories,”
he said.
But in a separate interview, Ms. Bavuso said that beyond setting forth
the broad principle of fair compensation, N.Y.U. does not actually
monitor what the construction companies pay their workers, nor should
it. “We’re not involved in the negotiation of the contracts that the
partners are doing, just as they’re not in the negotiation of the
contracts that we’re doing,” she said. “We have a relationship with our
partners, and so we have to trust that what they’re coming up with are
the reasonable wages on their end.”
N.Y.U. officials said that no complaints had been raised about the
treatment of the security guards, cafeteria cooks and secretaries who
staffed N.Y.U. Abu Dhabi’s temporary location while its permanent campus
was being built. Over the years, 19 of them were identified as having
paid a recruitment fee, and they were reimbursed, officials said.
As for the men who were building the new campus — who outnumber those
nonconstruction staff members by about 30 to 1 — Ms. Bavuso drew a
distinction. Construction workers who “were recruited for this job,” she
said, are treated with the same protections as the university’s own
staff. But that is not possible, she said, for a worker brought over by
a construction company and moved from site to site.
Photo
N.Y.U.’s construction at Saadiyat Island is now complete. Credit Sergey
Ponomarev for The New York Times
The construction workers, however, did not describe having been
recruited for any particular job site. They say they were recruited by
manpower agencies or by construction companies that, like most large
contractors, have people stationed at several job sites. The men might
spend five months on one project, two years on another, just going where
they are sent.
Stuck in Limbo
With major construction at N.Y.U. now concluded, most workers have moved
on to other job sites. Those who were arrested for striking are back in
their home countries.
Ramkumar Rai and Tibendra Kota, two Nepali men who worked for a
contractor, Robodh, on the N.Y.U. site (for months, in Mr. Rai’s case;
years, in Mr. Kota’s), are still in limbo.
From a certain perspective, both were success stories. They got
promotions. They got raises. They made decent money. But during their
last six months on the university site, their employer fell behind on
wages. And then in February 2013, their jobs came to an end.
Since then they have asked many times for their back pay, and have even
gone to the company’s headquarters in Dubai, where they say they got a
meeting with someone who introduced himself as the chief executive. But
they have gotten only tiny sums of cash, and a request that they not
pursue the matter in labor court.
It has been 16 months since they were last paid, during which time their
work visas expired; even if they decided to give up the fight, they
would face stiff exit fines at the airport. They could not afford to fly
themselves home anyway: Over the course of more than a year without pay,
they have racked up more than $1,000 in debt at the local grocery. So
they stay, and they wait.
Jayaprakash Punathil, an assistant general manager at Robodh, said he
was not aware of any outstanding payments.
Said Mr. Rai:
“They keep saying, ‘We’ll send the money; we’ll send it,’ but they don’t.”
“There’s no work; there’s no money: It’s really hard,” he said. “Having
done so much work, to have no money: It’s so painful.”
Sondra Hausner contributed reporting from Oxford, England, and Kiran
Nazish from New York.
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