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Labour standards have hit the headlines once again in the UAE, with a new report from Human Rights Watch on the conditions for workers on the flagship development Saadiyat Island, which is off the coast of the country’s capital Abu Dhabi.

Entitled ‘The Island of Happiness: Exploitation of migrant workers on Saadiyat Island’,  the report comes just seven weeks after Panorama’ ‘Slumdogs and Millionaires’, an hour long expose of working conditions on Dubai’s construction sites generating huge international media coverage.

Currently a mangrove swamp, the increasingly ironically named ‘The Island of Happiness’ is a high profile, multipurpose development which, once completed, will be home to, amongst other things, the Guggenheim and Louvre museums, a campus of New York University, 2 golf courses, private residences, a marina, and 29 hotels.

2,000 workers are said to be on site so far, preparing the island for development, with the numbers increasing significantly through the rest of 2009. At its peak the island will have 40,000 workers.

The key criticisms levied in the report are:

• Workers were required to pay fees to agencies to get their jobs, despite this being outlawed in the UAE
• Passports retained and no opportunity to transfer jobs as a result of visa restrictions
• Low take home pay (said to be significantly lower than workers were promised by agents before they left their home countries)
• No facilities for organising collectively and limited access to legal facilities for remediating issues

The report also sets out recommendations for the Tourism Development Investment Company (TDIC – the developer responsible for Saadiyat Island which is owned by the Abu Dhabi government), the other organisations involved including the Guggenheim Foundation and NYU University, the contractors in the project and the government of the UAE.

The government has cricised the report, saying that it “lacked credibility, substance and transparency and failed to recognise the government’s consistent efforts to improve the rights and conditions of all those working in the country”. “The UAE is particularly surprised and disappointed by HRW’s attempts to sensationalise the drawbacks in the country’s labour policies into media sound bites, without consideration of the rapid strides that have been made over the past few years and that are well underway here as part of the UAE government agenda,” he told WAM. TDIC issued a statement yesterday saying that  “the report not only neglects ’s policies, procedures and actions related to worker welfare, but also makes misleading assertions and false assumptions due to HRW’s questionable methodology and flawed research”.

This is a familiar stand-off between the campaigners and the employers.  In our experience, on the one hand, allegations are rarely completely unfounded, but on the other, campaigners fail to take into account the complexity of delivering good labour standards in complex supply chains.  We generally find that the truth lies somewhere in between.  Key areas of difficulty tend to include:

• Policies and procedures in place at the top level but the nature of the supply chain and subcontracting means that workers do not experience the benefits in their day to day working lives
• Companies’ internal compliance teams are sometimes not sufficiently resourced and/or trained and are are unable  to get to the bottom of the issues
• Worker interviews are sometimes not placed at the heart of internal auditing methodologies, and thus the findings of any investigation are limited
• Workers are scared of speaking to internal auditors, as they perceive them to be representatives of management, and they fear that they will lose their jobs if they are honest about their working conditions.  They often speak more freely to journalists or researchers.

TDIC and the other companies involved have the opportunity to look very hard at their own processes and to make sure they have a good understanding of the experiences of workers, now when the workforce is at only 5% of its eventual strength.  As the workforce swells, the issues will become more complex and the opportunities for problems will multiply.  We urge TDIC to work with its critics to demonstrate a real commitment to making the Island of Happiness a reality for all involved.