Abuse Of Migrant Labor In the Middle East

Why is migrant labor so ubiquitous in the Middle East and why are their no laws of significance to protect workers' rights?

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The skyscrapers of Dubai were built by imported cheap labor. The elite households of Beirut was cleaned by imported cheap labor as well. And construction in Tel Aviv is also often the product of cheap labor.

Several Middle Eastern nations rely heavily on imported labor for reasons that A) natives will not do the work and B) natives will do the work, but employers prefer importer cheap labor in order to increase profit margins. This would be fine if the legal protections were in order.

People who leave their country to work elsewhere clearly do not have better domestic options, so it is in there interest to go work somewhere else and send money back home. So migrant labor is not a bad thing. It provides economic opportunities to many people around the world who would otherwise fall short in life.

But what is bad is when this labor is not protected by legal codes. And this is the case in the Middle East. Take the notorious example of Dubai. Imported labor is denied any pretense of rights: workers have passports confiscated upon arrival, often paid months in delay and sometimes not paid at all, denied the right to unionize, injury or even death on the job is simply dismissed, and wages are so low that workers need to work years before they can break even and pay off their exorbitant fees which are necessary to secure a worker visa. The latter part, in effect, makes migrant labor a contemporary form of indentured servitude. This is a reality repeated throughout the oil rich Gulf where construction is the prerogative of imported labor so mistreated that one worker in Doha, Qatar once stated that they are treated akin to "quasi-slaves".

In Lebanon, middle class families hire imported nannies often from the Philippines, Ethiopia and Sri Lanka. These maids are often so abused - beaten, raped, denied pay, made to sleep outside in the balcony, ect... - that the nation has an incredibly horrific suicide rate of nannies. Google: Marco Villa - Maid in Lebanon to read my writing on this shameful tragedy. Syrian workers are often attacked and killed in Lebanon as well by ultra-nationalists who resent the Syrian regime and cowardly lash out at innocent Syrians.

And Israel also has a ignoble record of mistreating migrant labor and placing them outside the legal fold of protection. The New York Times (abridged):

At least 250,000 foreign laborers, about half of them illegal, are living in the country, according to the Israeli government. They include Chinese construction workers, Filipino home health care aides and Thai farmhands, as well as other Asians, and Africans and Eastern Europeans, working as maids, cooks and nannies.

Those who overstay their visas and try to remain in Israel live in fear of the Oz Unit, a recently created division of immigration police officers who hunt down illegal migrants and assist in their deportation.

“All too often we have to fight to make Israelis see that these foreign workers are human beings,” said Dana Shaked, the coordinator for Chinese laborers at Kav LaOved, a workers’ rights group.

The Chinese end up in the most desperate straits here partly because they are recruited through a murky network of manpower companies that rights groups say operate like human trafficking rings. Chinese pay up to $31,000 in illegal recruitment fees, the highest fees of all foreign workers, according to Kav LaOved, which says the money ends up in the pockets of go-betweens and government agencies in both countries.

The Chinese must work for an average of two years just to repay the money they borrow to afford those fees. Unaware of their rights and unable to speak Hebrew or English, many fall victim to a minefield of abuse like squalid living conditions, withheld wages and the early termination of work permits, which make them liable for deportation before they have repaid the recruitment fees or saved money for themselves.

Most Chinese endure the injustices more quietly than the workers who staged the dramatic crane protests last year. Some, like Liu Shiqi, 39, said he showed up to his job as a cook one March morning to find the restaurant closed and the owner gone without paying him. “They know we’re alone and don’t speak Hebrew, so they take advantage of us,” he said.

There should be a universal declaration in support of workers' rights which is actually enforced under the penalty of, say, tariffs against the violating and offending nation.