A main thoroughfare in Dubai was blocked by hundreds of construction workers, mostly from India and Pakistan, today. Traffic at rush hour was brought to halt, by workers who were protesting over their missing salaries for the months as far back as May and the fact that they did not have clean drinking water or water in the bathrooms of the camp in which they were housed.
Yesterday dozens of hungry workers gathered outside the Labor Ministry said their employer had not paid them for five months. Thirty-seven Indian, Nepalese, Pakistani and Bangladeshi men all work for a Saudi-owned construction company.
“We ran out of money months ago,” one Nepalese worker, Bisnu Bahadur, told Gulf News, “and sometimes we borrow from friends. If they have no money, we sleep hungry.” Bahadur said the men were falling ill out of hunger and because they had no clean drinking water. “Water at the labor camp is salty. We cannot wash,” he said.
The men were unable to even file a complaint with the Labor Ministry because they didn’t have the money necessary to cover the costs.
This is not the first time that these expat workers have protested against their working conditions. Hundred of workers spontaneously rushed onto the same main Dubai street, Shaikh Zayed Road last November to protest their company's apathy after a fire ravaged their compound in the camp.
A tremendous real estate boom which is underway in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Dubai has brought in large numbers of foreign workers to do the work. Some 10 million foreign workers are employed in the country. Dozens of skyscrapers are going up thanks to the legions of workers from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Men without a formal education and with little hope for employment back home come to the Gulf to earn 200 dollars US a month to feed and clothe their families. Usually, half of their salaries goes for their own meager survival—rice, tea, sugar—in cramped quarters where six live to a room.
According to AsiaNews many are held in “quasi-slave conditions.”
Unlike skilled Western expats in Dubai who live and play in comfort, Asian workers are banned from fancy stores, the new golf courses and the fashionable underwater restaurants. Instead, they have to put up working at 50 degrees Celsius, going home to see their families only once every two years, and getting injured in frequent work-related accidents.
Asian workers have no voice and no rights. Trades unions are banned. Workers who have staged protests in the past about their poor conditions have drawn swift crackdowns by police. ‘Troublemakers’ are rapidly deported.
Human Rights Watch (HRW) denounced the forced-labor conditions in which many migrant workers find themselves throughout the UAE. Many suffer discrimination and abuse. Women, who come in huge numbers as maids and hotel workers, are at particular risk of violence and sexual assault.
In a letter to the World Bank president, HRW lamented that “workers are often afraid to demand unpaid wages, protest [against] poor conditions, or seek legal recourse for abuses.” The letter fell on deaf ears.
As to those maids, Labor ministry officials say they know that recruitment agencies are abusing foreign housemaids they bring into the country to work, but claim the ministry is powerless to oversee their activities.
Asked by Gulf News about complaints from housemaids that agencies keep them in tiny attics, beat them and give them very little to eat before delivering them to their sponsor, an official from the Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs said he was aware of what was happening.
“Yes, hundreds of housemaids are mistreated by the agencies, and we know that,” he said. “But we can’t inspect them and go inside to find out what is going on. Even the Interior Ministry cannot do that. The agencies are taking advantage of this.”
A Gulf News reporter visited four recruitment agencies in Dubai, Sharjah and Ajman, posing as a potential employer. In one agency about 25 housemaids of different nationalities were crowded into a small room above the office. They crouched silently on the floor.
“Take one,” the woman at the agency said. Gulf News saw a lady at one agency slap one of the housemaids who had been returned by a dissatisfied client. The maid had neither done nor said anything before she was slapped in the face.
Migrant News Monitor reports an Indonesian housemaid named Hini, now working for a family in Sharjah, told them the previous housewife who employed her in Abu Dhabi forced her to wear a veil day and night in the house because she was young and pretty. When the housewife found her sleeping without a headscarf, she said, “She kicked me and woke me up, asking me to cover my hair while sleeping.
"I cried a lot and I asked them to send me back to the agency, who also mistreated me and they used to beat me until I found another sponsor who treated me well.” She said back at the agency in Dubai dozens of maids were kept in a small room.
Maria, another housemaid at another agency in Sharjah, said she and 20 other housemaids were kept in a small attic above the agency.
A woman who runs a labour recruitment agency in Sharjah told Gulf News she kept the housemaids in an attic at the agency while they were awaiting deportation or changes in their visas.
The number of foreign housemaids in the UAE is estimated at 300,000. They represent 20 per cent of the workforce. However, this number is expected to rise to 800,000 by 2010, according to figures released by Dubai Municipality two years ago.
Big companies, including many Western companies who employ these workers, defend these conditions saying that workers have come to the UAE voluntarily. Sources: Gulf News (UAE), AKI (Italy), Asia News, Migrant News Monitor
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