‘Labor pains’ described at UAE meeting with workers

Laborers gathered Wednesday for an event aimed at showcasing how the UAE is trying to make labor laws more understandable instead discussed unscrupulous bosses, abuses and poor conditions rampant across the Gulf Arab states.
Wearing handed-out white baseball caps reading “I (heart) UAE,” laborers praised the Emirati effort at translating labor laws while still complaining about stagnant wages and being suckered by agents into jobs they didn’t want.
“The companies are gaining. They are making all the profits. What about the laborers?” asked Adnan Chaudhry, 30, of Pakistan, who works in human resources at a copper manufacturing plant. “The managers are up, up, up and the laborers are down, down, down.”
Gulf nations long have relied on migrant labor to build their oil-funded skylines, drive their taxi cabs and clean their hotel rooms. In the UAE, foreign workers vastly outnumber locals.
On Wednesday, Emirati officials gathered before several hundred workers at what appeared to be a model residential camp for laborers and managers on the outskirts of Abu Dhabi, the Emirati capital. They answered a series of questions from workers as Saqr Ghobash, the UAE’s minister of human resources and emiratization, moved through the crowd, trailed by television cameras.
But even here, with security guards holding trays full of expensive chocolates, taxi drivers discussed how their housing didn’t allow them to cook meals. Others talked about being in small rooms split in two, with 10 men sleeping inside at a time. An apprentice taxi driver said he had his pay docked any time he did poorly on an exam.
“I’m not happy,” said the taxi driver from Nigeria’s southern Edo state, who asked his name not be used for fear of losing his job. “I wish I never came.”
Habib Rehman, a Pakistani who works in human resources for a construction firm, said he appreciated the effort to translate labor laws into languages like Hindi, Tamil, Bengali and Urdu, but said a wider campaign was needed to educate all workers. Also, even laborers who know their rights sometimes face bosses who threaten to ban them from the UAE, he said.
“There are people in between who have been misusing” the laws, Rehman said. “They put them under pressure, blackmailing them.”
Ali Ebrahim Al-Shehhi, a senior administrator at the Dubai labor office who attended Wednesday’s meeting, answered several of Rehman’s questions, stressing workers should document what they see and never sign a paper they don’t understand.
However, when pressed by Rehman about bosses and company heads knowingly breaking the law, he said Emirati authorities wouldn’t allow it. “The world has changed,” Al-Shehhi said. “You have to change your mentality.”
Source: Arab News