NYU has announced plans to open a full-service, NYU degree-issuing branch campus in Abu Dhabi (United Arab Emirates).
WHO’S BUILDING THE GLOBAL U?
DID YOU KNOW THAT . . .
• most of the UAE’s 500,000 migrant construction workers come from South Asian countries such as India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, while the total migrant worker population is 2,738,000, or 95 per cent of the workforce?
• the US State Department has recognized human trafficking to the United Arab Emirates that results in involuntary servitude to be a serious and continual problem?
• employers often collect and hold employees’ passports, rendering them unable to leave the country?
• migrant workers face severe rights abuse, including nonpayment of wages, no overtime pay despite long working hours, unsafe working conditions such as having to work construction jobs in dangerous heat, and unsanitary living conditions?
• construction companies provide no public information on the number of workers injured or killed on the job?
• UAE law contains no provisions protecting the right to collective bargaining?
• the government of Abu Dhabi has deported workers who strike in protest of their working conditions?
• employers have been known to blacklist employees from returning to the country when employees quit before their work contracts expire?
• UAE law does not permit most migrant workers from changing employers?
• the government routinely fails to enforce the legal protections for migrant workers that do exist?
SHOULD NYU GIVE ITS NAME TO AND PROFIT FROM A CAMPUS BUILT AND OPERATED UNDER THESE CONDITIONS?
SIGN THE PETITION URGING NYU TO ADOPT A FAIR LABOR CODE OF CONDUCT: http://www.petitiononline.com/nyulabor/petition.html
Information taken from the Human Rights Watch World Report 2008, available at http://hrw.org/englishwr2k8/docs/2008/01/31/uae17622.htm and the Human Rights Watch Report “Building Towers, Cheating Workers: Exploitation of Migrant Construction Workers in the United Arab Emirates,” available at http://hrw.org/reports/2006/uae1106/index.htm. Questions? email FairLaborNYU@gmail.com.
