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Empty Apologies

On May 20, 2014

At 10:57 am

In General

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New York University expresses its deep apologies for the workers exploited in building their new Abu Dhabi campus. Of course, they are probably not sorry enough to do anything about it. They certainly didn’t heed the many warnings about the horrifying exploitation of immigrant labor in the United Arab Emirates. NYU could have had someone on site monitoring the labor conditions that would actually try to find out what was going on rather one who papered over problems to make the client happy. It could employ these workers directly and be the responsible party for paying them. It could have constructed its own dormitories for these workers.

But of course it did none of these things. NYU administrators were just following the cash. It contracted out the labor and completely forgot about it until the news reports about the exploitation came out. If NYU wants to take real responsibility, it will take on liability for these workers. Otherwise, this falls into the empty “I’m sorry we were caught” category of apology.

higher education, labor, united arab emirates

Anon21

Why is NYU even investing in a horrible petrocracy like the UAE? Besides the routine, horrific exploitation of workers, they’ve also got cutting-edge practices on bankruptcy (imprisonment for debt) and women’s rights (if you report a rape, you get locked up for having sex outside marriage!). And yet because Dubai has awesome malls and hotels, people are willing to overlook the fact that it’s a repressive nightmare for everyone except wealthy tourists who are fortunate enough not to break a rule.
- dsn
  
  I get the sense it isn’t so much NYU investing in Dubai, but that they were offered a dump truck full of money, and said “yes please”
- Warren Terra
  
  Yeah, the degree to which what’s legal in the gulf emirates approaches slavery is just appalling. Last week Qatar announced reforms that will utterly fail to change their current system under which it’s expected that the employer will seize the passport of their foreign employee, who is allowed neither to find new employment nor to leave the country unless their employer chooses to permit it, and has essentially no recourse should their employer fail to pay them or should their employer abuse them.
  
  About the only difference with the slave trade of yore is that – so far as we know – the workers were all conned into this trap, even paying for the privilege, as opposed to being seized by force for the purpose.
  - Linnaeus
    
    They knew what they were getting into!
  - Nick
    
    Not conned — see my long post below — in modern labour slavery, you enslave yourself. This cannot be truly avoided in any job where you pay to work, the degree of exploitation differs but the potential is always there.
- Linnaeus
  
  Given NYU’s attitude toward some of its own workers, this doesn’t surprise me.
- Unemployed Northeastern
  
  Because NYU wants the money of wealthy Middle Eastern families who are too socially conservative to send their children (read: daughters) to NYC at age 18. See also: NYU’s campus in Shanghai.
  
  Side note: NYU Abu Dhabi is in Abu Dhabi, not Dubai.
  - Warren Terra
    
    NYU Abu Dhabi is in Abu Dhabi, not Dubai.
    
    That’s what they want you to think!
- ruviana
  
  The point about NYU Shanghai underlines what’s a growing practice among a lot of “name” universities. They park a campus in the Middle East or China (among other places) and let the bucks roll in. If you google around you can see it’s growing practice.
  - J. Otto Pohl
    
    NYU has programs here at the University of Ghana, but they have not yet set up their own separate university in the country yet.
  - njc
    
    They also have a campus in Singapore.
  - Bijan Parsia
    
    Yep. Though my impression is that the petrostates reach out to the unis. Manchester was wined and dined by some Dubai thing to lend our name to some program. Often, it’s a fast route to producing a recognized degree granting program.
    
    (It didn’t go through, but I’m sure that meant leaving a lot of money on the table. Given the horrendously stupid visa moves of the “government”, it’s harder to recruit overseas students so these sort of shared models might become more prevalent.
    
    Liverpool CS has some sort of deal with a Chinese university in which students from there come to finish up their degree (1 or 2 years) at Liverpool. A very helpful deal for those scouse bastards!)
junker

My favorite line at NY Mag: “It turns out declaring yourselves in favor of safe, fair employment standards on your website does not magically make these things happen.”
LeeEsq

Anon21, lucre and false prestige.
Nick

My father-in-law in Thailand is a former worker in the Gulf, and a moneylender today to laborers who want to work there; so just for information purposes, I thought I’d detail the chain of events that take people over there, and why other options aren’t chosen. Everything here applies only to Thailand:

1) The people who do this work aren’t generally able to read English, so they can’t find work themselves.

1.1) Even if they could, the employer usually has a relationship with an agent; they don’t accept random job applications.

2) The laborer doesn’t have to pay the fee (between 1,000 and 5,000 dollars, depending on the quality of the job) until they actually have an offer.

2.1) But when they do have an offer, they have to pay within a week. This precludes getting a bank loan — in Thailand, a bank loan is the result of a long process of meeting with the bank, demonstrating title, wining and dining the bank’s land assessors, followed by months of inaction and then possible approval. At least for rural farmers, it’s probably different in cities.

2.2) So, they go to a village moneylender. These are common, and are not loan sharks in the Western sense, just locals with money. Most of them worked abroad at some point, and they offer advice as well. The moneylenders charge between 3 and 5% per month.

2.3) The person borrowing money will actually sign their land over to the moneylender at this time, as a bill of sale; if they pay back the money, the moneylender is expected to return the deed. I haven’t heard about this not happening, as moneylending is lucrative and people would stop going to someone who reneged, but it is a possibility.

3) They pay the agent and sign the contract. Usually about half the pay goes to things like room and board, travel, etc.

3.1) It’s normal for the total loan + interest to be larger than the total worth of the contract (i.e. they pay to work). Why do they take it? Two reasons:

3.1.1) They hope to get a contract extension, or work overtime, to make up the difference.

3.1.2) This is the only opportunity a villager will ever have to deal with large sums. If not this, then trying to save money by selling veggies at a few cents a day, which is another form of madness. Money that moves in large amounts can sometimes stick, even to a peasant.

3.1.3) My father-in-law spent 11 years working in Saudi Arabia and Iraq; the first three of those were paying back his debt, the final eight were saving money (about 12,000 dollars).

4) The agent is in Thailand, the job is in another country. If the worker goes and there is no job, or a job and no pay, the agent has no responsibility.

4.1) When this happens, they come back to Thailand and go drive a taxi in Bangkok.

At every stage, the system is set up so that the laborer bears all the risk, pays all the cost, and has no recourse to any legal mechanism. The actual repayment of the loan is informal, as many other village systems are — though the interest is high, it can be negotiated in ways that a bank loan can’t, after the fact. The worst victims, in my experience, are the ones who go abroad and find a job with irregular pay — they are basically enslaved, hoping to earn enough to pay back their loan, unable to return home, and really pretty hopeless. I met Thai workers like that on Saipan, who had no access to legal assistance because they had a period of illegality in their working history, that made them ineligible for any form of amnesty or relief.
- Nick
  
  Just to be clear, 3.0 means that the worker’s pay goes to those things, not the money that they pay to the agent. That fee is never seen again in fact or rumour, sort of like gold treasure accumulated by a dragon.
  - Tom Scudder
    
    Thanks for this. Looks familiar, but I haven’t seen it laid out quite so matter-of-factly.
    - Bijan Parsia
      
      Yes, this was fascinating. Thanks, Nick.
- Ronan
  
  What’s the relationship between the moneylenders and the labourers like ? On a personal level (is there resentment) and social level (are the ML’s local elites) ?
  - Nick
    
    At least in my village, the relationship is good. ‘Moneylender’ is accurate, but distorts what we think — basically, everyone is either a moneylender or in debt, sometimes both. In Thai, ‘moneylending’ is an action verb, but not a noun or a career. There are distinctions in prestige, since moneylenders tend to have more money, but since most of these are simply peasants who made good, it’s not usually huge.
  - Nick
    
    Also, collection isn’t usually violent, repayment schedules can be extended by years or even decades, and interest often gets adjusted. But it depends on different people, everything I’m saying is based on my experience of lying around my father-in-law’s compound while people come in to borrow money or pay it back.
- LFC
  
  So the agent is paid betw 1 and 5 thousand for what — what does the agent do exactly? Arrange for passports or visas, make plane reservations, handle other logistics, or what?
  - Nick
    
    The agent is the connection to the job. There are three possibilities for their role:
    
    1) they provide a service by doing the basic admin work in Thailand
    
    2) they are paid by the foreign company to recruit workers
    
    3) they pay the company for the right to recruit laborers; in effect, the company is getting its workers to pay them for the right to work.
    
    The agent is the key to every aspect of this scam; by existing, they manage to vanish responsibility for the money:job exchange somewhere on the flight out of Thailand. Without them, the final hiring authority doesn’t have deniability, and it’s obvious that the worker is paying for a job.
  - Nick
    
    And yes, the agent does pay for those things, but they aren’t expensive — that’s not the reason that the fee exists.
    - LFC
      
      thanks, that clarified it.
Bruce Vail

The New Yorker did a great piece last year on the president of NYU and the business plan behind the foreign campuses. It’s a good read:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/09/09/130909fa_fact_aviv

These labor issues were all hashed out then so NYU can make no claim it did not know what was happening.
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