88m3
Fast Money & Foreign Objects
By ARIEL KAMINER and SEAN O’DRISCOLLMAY 18, 2014
Photo
Migrant workers, in their tiny apartment in Abu Dhabi, earn as little as $272 a month while building a campus for New York University. CreditSergey Ponomarev for The New York Times
Continue reading the main storyShare This Page
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/19/n...icmst=1388552400000&bicmet=1420088400000&_r=1
long article
Photo
Migrant workers, in their tiny apartment in Abu Dhabi, earn as little as $272 a month while building a campus for New York University. CreditSergey Ponomarev for The New York Times
Continue reading the main storyShare This Page
- Continue reading the main story
RELATED COVERAGEThe 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.
Photo
Immigrants account for 85 percent of the population in the U.A.E. Migrant construction workers can work 12 hours a day, 6 or 7 days a week. CreditSergey Ponomarev for The New York Times
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.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/19/n...icmst=1388552400000&bicmet=1420088400000&_r=1
long article