Latest Information

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 [...]

This week, The Guardian is running a series of articles and videos giving a ‘portrait’ of modern China.  This coincides with the newspaper’s new trial to offer selected Guardian articles in Chinese. On day one, we see a video of the experiences of one migrant worker forced to return from Shenzhen to her parents’ farm [...]

Following the success of last year’s Blood Sweat and T-shirts, the reality TV programme which dropped young fashionistas in Indian garment factories, to experience the working conditions behind their clothes, BBC3 have just announced that they will be transferring the concept to the food supply chain. Starting on Tuesday 19th May 2009, Blood Sweat and [...]

We maintain a large database of relevant news stories, blogs and resources on a wide range of topics: Ethical trade Labour standards Working conditions Gangmasters Migrant labour The database currently holds over 3000 stories and is updated daily and covers stories from across the globe.  We tag and categorise these stories using our Delicious account. [...]

In the absence of a government body like the UK’s Health and Safety Executive companies in the UAE have formed a partnership to share information on health and safety risks and best practices. In operation since October 2007 Build Safe UAE (BSU), as the partnership is known, now has 88 membership organisations from all phases [...]

This week talks in the European Parliament about amendments to the Working Time Directive broke down, meaning that the UK will keep the opt-out of the 48 hour working week indefinitely. The news will be welcomed by business groups who have long held that a working week which can be flexible and extended if workers [...]

With the Dubai Centre for Responsible Business‘s ‘Responsible Business Dialogue’ on Monday, the UAE Ministry of Labour’s ‘Labour and Human Rights Conference‘ on Tuesday and the ‘GCC Leadership Summit on Labour Management‘ on Wednesday, it has been a busy week for Impactt MENA! As you will have seen from our blogs of the past few [...]

Last week Impactt attended an interesting event called ‘Putting market access into practice: Reaching the bottom billion through corporate supply and distribution chains.’ The event, organised by ODI, DFID and Business Action for Africa explored how supply and distribution chains can be harnessed to expand opportunities for the poor while delivering key business benefits. Speakers [...]

As you will have seen from the Impactt newsfeed and blog, there has been significant coverage recently on the conditions for migrant construction workers in Dubai and the UAE. What it often not realised however, is that there is also a thriving manufacturing industry in operation here which is well placed to serve global markets. [...]

7 Days, (Dubai’s equivalent of the UK’s free morning paper the Metro), reported yesterday that workers employed by Gunal Construction Trading and Industry in Dubai refused to work over the weekend because of the substandard conditions in which they are living. The article reports that raw sewage was overflowing from septic tanks in workers’ accommodation [...]