Posted By: Brad Martin

Sat Nov 11, 9:08 PM ET

DUBAI (AFP) - Human Rights Watch (HRW) has slammed the United Arab Emirates' record of abuse against migrant construction workers, urging the government to keep its promise to enforce labor laws.
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"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," the New York-based HRW said in a report.

The report, "Building Towers, Cheating Workers", highlighted what it called "serious abuses of construction workers" by employers in the UAE, and said its information was based on interviews with 60 workers.

"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 report said.

"Unless the government starts to hold employers accountable for breaking the law, the UAE’s colossal new skyscrapers will be known for monumental labor violations," said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director at HRW.

"Hundreds of gleaming towers have risen on the backs of migrants working in highly exploitative conditions," she said.

She welcomed an order by Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashed al-Maktoum last week to enforce the country's labor law and push ahead with certain reforms "based on Human Rights Watch's recommendations."

"The prime minister’s decree to protect workers' rights is a welcome step in the right direction," Whitson said.

The report said that most of the UAE's 500,000 migrant construction workers come from South Asian countries such as India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, while the total migrant worker population is 2,738,000, or 95 percent of the workforce.

The embassies of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh repatriated the bodies of 880 construction workers in 2004, HRW said, adding that the government can account for only a few of these deaths "primarily because it appears not to enforce its own laws requiring employers to report worksite deaths and injuries."

HRW also highlighted the burden of debt incurred by workers because of fees they pay recruitment agencies inside or outside the UAE when the country's law expects employers to meet these costs.

"Recruiting agencies unlawfully force workers, rather than their employers, to pay 2,000-3,000 (dollars) for travel, visas, government fees and the recruiters’ own services," it said.

Workers end up borrowing from their recruiting agents at steep monthly interest rates as high as 10% to pay this, HRW said.

"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," it added.

HRW said that employers also tend to withhold workers' wages to keep them from quitting, and the law prohibits them from getting a new job without the consent of their old employer.

"There is no public record of a single case where it (government) has penalized an employer with fines or imprisonment for failing to pay wages, or any other breaches of the labor law," it said.

Migrant workers do not benefit from the country's minimum wage, earning between 106 and 250 dollars a month compared with a national average of 2,106 dollars, HRW said.

On Tuesday, Sheikh Mohammed ordered the labor minister to "take all necessary steps to organize the affairs of foreign workers... and to assure them of all the conditions of health, security and a dignified life, both in their places of residence and at work," the official WAM news agency reported.

Sheikh Mohammed, the emir of booming Dubai where disgruntled foreign laborers have staged several protests, also decreed the setting up of a special court to resolve labor disputes.

HRW welcomed this "swift response and inherent acknowledgement of the problem of abuse", but highlighted the UAE's continuing ban on trade unions and strikes, despite earlier promises to legalize unions.

"We hope that the government’s new promise to enforce its labor laws does not share the same fate as its broken promise to legalize trade unions," Whitson said.

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