Last year, the NY Times reported on the conditions experienced by migrant workers building NYU's campus in Abu Dhabi. The story shocked a number of people at my old school, but it didn't surprise me. I'd heard numerous stories like it from people working for my parents in India who spent time in the Middle East. It's pretty much an open secret in much of South-East Asia that employers across the Middle-East exercise immense control over foreign workers and they confiscate passports, control housing, etc. Some of the worst abuses are related to household workers.
The original NY Times story is here: http://www.nytimes.com/...
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.
Then this happened, last week:
N.Y.U. Professor Is Barred by United Arab Emirates
The United Arab Emirates, where New York University opened a new campus last year, has barred an N.Y.U. professor from traveling to the monarchy after his criticism of the exploitation of migrant construction workers there.
The professor, Andrew Ross, who teaches at the university’s New York campus and specializes in labor issues, said on Monday that he learned over the weekend that he had been barred from the country, ostensibly because of unspecified security concerns. He received the news at Kennedy International Airport, where he was scheduled to board an Etihad Airways flight to Abu Dhabi, the capital and the site of the N.Y.U. campus. He had planned to spend his spring break there, continuing his research on labor conditions.
and...
A freelance journalist based in the Emirates who collaborated on that article, Sean O’Driscoll, said in an interview on Monday that he was summoned by the authorities several weeks after its publication and offered immunity from prosecution and high pay if he would agree to publish pro-government articles.
It gets curiouser and curiouser as we learn today that:
Murky Inquiry Targets Critic of N.Y.U. Role in Abu Dhabi, and a Reporter
New York University’s fraught tenure as an intellectual prize of the Middle East has taken a new and mysterious turn: A private investigator has been making inquiries about an N.Y.U. professor who criticized the exploitation of migrant workers building the university’s campus in Abu Dhabi.