The Trouble With Labour

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The local partner of the New York Times, which reprints the newspaper for a small and discerning audience in the UAE, chose not to print one issue of the paper this week, Monday's, which carried a report on the labour conditions of the men who built the now completed New York University building in Abu Dhabi.

The article is of course available online for anyone who knows what an Internet is. It's linked here. Buzzfeed, playing Chinese whispers, makes a number of small but critical errors in its coverage of the incident, claiming this is "...the first time UAE authorities had tried to censor an NYT story."

Except it wasn't any 'authority'. The Khaleej Times reprints the NYT and the decision was clearly theirs. The NYT's own letter to subscribers makes it clear that Khaleej Times "deemed it too sensitive". Not the National Media Council, which would have been the censoring body if authority was to come into play.

The move, a muckle-headed one on KT's part if you don't mind me saying so, does the UAE a disservice. The story needed to be aired locally, the attempt to suppress it was clearly futile and did more damage to the country's reputation than letting the piece run would have caused.

I am increasingly frequently enraged by expats acting the censor. They err on the side of caution, fearful for their precious tax-free jobs and then they make fools of us all. We can't talk about that, best avoid this. The whispered, winked conversations are infuriating. It's the politics of the playground, my dad's bigger than yours. "I'm, let us say, close to those in authority and I don't mind telling you this wouldn't play well," says Sam Cheeseman as he stamps his mark on the commentary which actually doesn't 'cross' any 'line' as we know it.

The National Media Council has read, and passed for publication, two of my three serious Middle East based novels. I subsequently chose to take content out because I thought it unnecessarily offensive - my choice and decision entirely and not based on fear of my position here but purely on my judgement of the fine line between what is necessary to make a story 'play' and be realistic and what would annoy or cause offence to my readers. The 'C' word, for instance, I eventually chose not to use because I know women who find it highly offensive and the story lived on just dandy without it. The NMC left it in, I took it out.

The NMC has not asked me to change a word of my books. Not one word. Ever.

Olives - A Violent Romance contains pre-marital sex between Muslims and Christians, Muslims drinking alcohol and other stuff. Beirut - An Explosive Thriller goes way further. There's all sorts of stuff in there, from prostitution to heroin, booze and murder. The NMC didn't bat an eyelid.

Writer friends are sore amazed that books have to be read before being 'passed' as fit for publication, but the NMC is on a journey. When I first dropped wide-eyed onto the tarmac at Dubai International back in 1988, the Ministry Of Information ruled and its rule was indeed heavy-handed. The UAE gets very little credit for how very far it has come in such a relatively short time. Don't forget the UK was still banning and censoring things right up into the 1980s, from Lady Chatterley's Lover to Frankie Goes To Hollywood's Relax.

So you can stop wagging your finger in this direction, matey.

But the core fact in the NYT story and the spate of others like it that really has me wondering is this, undoubtedly set to be most unpopular, thought. If things are so very bad for labour in the UAE, then why - over fifty years after they started building this place - do the workers still come here?

I appreciate conditions are hard, harsh even. But has anyone done a comparative study of labour conditions in, say, Dhaka compared to here? I'm here because I'm better off than I would be at home. And so's everyone else. That's not a shallow argument or excuse. It's simple, plain fact. Ever since Safa Park was a makeshift shanty town for illegal immigrants (it later shifted to Mamzar), people have flocked to the UAE from the Subcontinent to work. Thousands of them have become millionaires in the UAE - having arrived with nothing.

Does that make it all any better or more admirable? 'Course not. But by living here as expats we condone the practice implicitly, perhaps even complicitly. Labour conditions in the UAE have clearly improved significantly over the years I have been here, but European sensibilities are still offended by the camps and reports of 12 hour workdays, let alone the deaths of men travelling from Umm Al Qawain to Jebel Ali to work.

Then there are the practices of agents and usurious visa salespeople, which have led to the popular phrase 'indentured labour' or, as the NYT weasels, 'resembles indentured servitude'. The gombeen men who prey on the workers are not Emirati, but from the workers' home countries. The, apparently infamous, kafala system applies to all expats in the UAE, it's simply sponsorship. That's what the word means, that's what the system is. Your employer provides your visa, contracts with you to employ you and is essentially in loco parentis, whether you're a labourer or a CEO.

Is it abused by companies? Yes. Widely? Yes. Is enough being done to stamp out the abuse of workers? No. Does suppressing media reporting of it help? No. Do constant skewed reports of labour conditions here by callow Western journalists applying selective sampling to make the story more dramatic and create more appealing headlines help the situation?

I'd argue not, actually. There's a lack of balance in the debate and by neglecting the efforts of the enlightened, you empower the entrenched.

More Tea, Vicar? The Mackwoods Factory And Labookellie Tea Centre

The Mackwoods factory at Labookellie is a charming trip

Mackwoods' tea factory at Labookellie is on the A5 up to Nuwara Eliya from Kandy, past Tawalantenne and the Ramboda Tunnel. You can't really miss it, sitting on a bend on the road, all green and white. It's surrounded by swirling rows of plantation, the lush green hillsides all around striated by tea bushes with colourful dots here and there - the tea pickers of fame - moving slowly between the lines.

Actually, they're more like nickers than pickers - they nick off the delicate, light green bud and topmost pair of leaves from each plant once a week or thereabouts, the thicker, darker leaves below are left to drop as natural compost. Each tree lasts up to 65 years and they're pruned every five years to keep them in check and generally show them who's boss.

Mackwoods makes fine tea - sending some to auction, some to Harrods and some retailed under its own brand name. The company also makes much of its 160-year heritage.

But like so many things you'll find in Sri Lanka, Mackwoods isn't actually quite what it seems.

The true history of Mackwoods is quite hard to define - there are some very 'fuzzy' periods in Sri Lankan tea history and although the company is keen to infer that its Labookellie plantation is part of an unbroken tradition spanning back to 1841 with the foundation of the company by retired sea captain William Mackwood, that's not actually quite the way it all worked out.

For a start, there was no commercial tea plantation in Sri Lanka in 1841. James Taylor didn't introduce commercial planting until 1867, with the establishment of the 19-acre Loolecondera plantation near Kandy. It wasn't until 1875 that the first plantations were established in Nuwara Eliya - a replacement for the island's devastated coffee industry, progressively wiped out by blight from the 1860s onwards.

Oddly, the company claims in its website that the first tea plantation in Sri Lanka was actually in 1867 - contemporaneous with Taylor's in Kandy - at Labookellie, by Solomon and Gabriel de Worms but this is not borne out by history. The de Worms brothers actually established the nearby Rothschild Estate and divested the estate in 1865. And their attempt at planting Chinese tea failed, while Taylor succeeded.

Besides, Labookellie belonged to The Ceylon Company at the time - later transferred to the Eastern Produce and Estates Company. And, in fact, Mackwoods (originally established in 1839, actually) wasn't a plantation company at all but a trading and shipping agency based in Colombo.

Whatever. Pressured, as so many others were, by the growing clouds of impending nationalisation and 'SriLankisation' when Ceylon gained its independence from Britain in 1948, the Mackwoods family sold out in 1956 to a Mr. N.S.O. Mendis, the deal claimed to be the first SriLankisation of a British sterling company. It was by no means to be the last, as a draconian wave of egregious nationalisations in 1971-72 saw every tea plantation in the country over 50 acres forcefully sequestered by the government.

Funnily enough, the impact of the nationalisation isn't mentioned at all in Mackwoods' carefully worded official history, neither is how it managed to acquire the rights to manage some 27,000 acres of plantation today. Oddly, before the shake-up of the nationalisation, Mackwoods appears to have owned the Carolina and Balmoral plantations. It manages neither currently. Whether it owned Labookellie prior to nationalisation is unclear - as is whether Mackwoods ever did own a plantation before Mendis acquired it.

In fact, all tea plantations in Sri Lanka currently remain in government hands with management contracts awarded to 'managing agents' on a long lease basis. Sri Lanka's 'privatised' RPCs or regional plantation companies manage the plantations and take a profit share as their 'management fee'. One of these 23 'super plantation' companies is Agalawatte Plantations Plc - a subsidiary of Mackwoods. It apparently acquired its management contract without having to go through any of that inconvenient competitive bidding stuff, which is always nice. And one of the many plantations included in its 'package' of plantations awarded by the government is Labookellie.

Not so prosaic as the whole sea captain thing, is it?

Back to the tea plantation visit

The Labookellie tea factory is open to visitors and so we duly visited. It's a very slick PR exercise indeed and they don't charge for tours of the factory, which are guided by smart young ladies in green Mackwoods uniforms. Like the tea pickers themselves, the girls are Tamil (The British coffee and then tea planters originally established the practice of importing Indian, Tamil, labour to work on the plantation and the tea industry's labour force remains dominated by 'Estate Tamils' today).

Drying the tea - 10,000 kg of green leaves are dried to 2,000 kg a day at Labookellie by the factory's four blowers

We are taken up to the drying room where the picked tea is dried, two huge batches a day go through the process of 'withering' which takes about 12 hours. Then the leaves go downstairs to be rolled, fermented, dried and then sifted into grades. It's all great fun to witness and our guide is smart and has the answers to all our questions about the process.

And then onto the tea room where the tea, despite a notice saying it's Rs35 a cup, is free. The wee square of chocolate cake is excellent and is charged for at a wicked Rs50 - about Dhs1.5...

Needless to say, the tea is excellent. We're happy buyers in the shop and go crazy buying every grade of tea we can find, although we balk at the silver-tip tea, which is the finest tea you can get, sold in fancy containers and savagely priced.

It's been fun. Mackwoods sees upwards of 2,000 people a week pass through its factory and the operation is slick, smart, well managed and totally on-brand. It's not often you'll meet that combination in Sri Lanka and it's all the more impressive when you do.

Even if the experience masks a somewhat murky past...

Invigorated by our experience and the cup that refreshes but does not intoxicate, we wend our way up the vertiginous road to the highlands of Nuwara Eliya and our appointment with destiny. Our hotel here is the boutique 5-room Jetwings Warwick House. And it's Jetwings who managed the Lighthouse Hotel in Galle - the site of The Worst Meal Of My Life.

What was this place - that promises so much and yet threatens so much - going to be like? The answer lies here!

Arabtec Strike - An Inconvenient Truth

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Dubai's largest construction company, Arabtec, has faced a relatively well co-ordinated labour dispute over the past few days, with UAE media reporting on the affair being somewhat patchy to say the least.

Gulf News in its story today says the company's Abu-Dhabi based workers refused to leave their accommodation on Saturday, with Dubai-based workers refusing to work the following day. However, yesterday's Gulf News story "Arabtec workers return to work" is at odds with 7Days' front page splash yesterday, which ran with 'workers down tools' in its story, 'How can we feed our families with Dhs750'?

The Abu Dhabi workers were based at the 'model' Saadiyat Island labour camp, with TDIC, Abu Dhabi's tourist authority and the master developer of Saadiyat Island (where Arabtex is building the Louvre) telling 7Days yesterday all 'workers have reported for work as usual'.

7Days' piece yesterday talked of 'hundreds' of workers on strike, with Gulf News talking about 'thousands' of strikers. Reuters goes with the 'thousands' figure in its story, run by GN today, which has Arabtec as stating 'the delivery of projects was unaffected by what it called a partial labour stoppage.'

Rather than running a Reuters file about a labour dispute on its own doorstep, 7Days today uses that old skill, journalism, to report on the end of the strike, saying that at least 6,000 workers had been involved in the work outage but they now felt they had 'no choice but to return to work as they are poor men'.

Quotes from both sides of the dispute point to a minority leading the majority to take action, which is hardly a surprise. Some workers had talked about being pressurised to join the strikers. And while it's fashionable to wring one's lace hankie and bemoan the fate of the UAE's labourers, these men signed contracts to work for that salary and are being housed in the best quality labour accommodation in the country. They are by no means the worst off - I have heard of Sri Lankan workers' wages in the garment industry here being more in the line of Dhs 400 a month.

It's also worth noting here that their pay, while a pittance by Western standards, is double the minimum wage in much of India and as much as four times the minimum wage in the worst-paid parts of the country. Bangladeshi labourers are comparatively much better off, earning over five times their country's national minimum wage.

On that same comparative scale, a British minimum wage labourer would be pulling in over $8,000 a month in the UAE, with food and accommodation paid for.

And before you pile into me for pointing out this very inconvenient truth, here's another one for you. We are all here in the Gulf on the back of minimum wage Asian labour - it's helping to fund our cosy expat lifestyles. And as you hammer the keyboard of your Mac to leave me an infuriated comment, reflect for a second how happy you were to buy that cut-price product made on the back of minimum wage Chinese labour (paid less, incidentally, than the Arabtec guys) working in conditions so harsh several have taken their own lives and anti-suicide netting is strung up in their labour accomodation.

Labour conditions in the UAE have improved immensely over the past twenty years and are likely better than those of neighbouring countries and although those conditions don't sit well with European sensibilities at times, still the labour comes here because this is still a comparatively better place to be for all of us, labourers included.

Meanwhile, Arabtec has apparently said it will hold the ringleaders 'accountable for their actions', which doesn't really strike that warm fuzzy peach note of conciliation. Bear in mind, too, Arabtec would hardly be pleased at the prospect of increasing the payroll by Dhs200 a month (the strikers' apparent demand) - that's a cool Dhs1.2 million loaded on the monthly payroll if we took just the strikers into consideration. But ArabTec employs 52,000 people according to its website. So that'd be around Dhs 10 million in extras every month.

Of course, quite apart from the massive cost, a wage increase now would also be seen to be rewarding the strike action. I can't see it happening, somehow - whether we, from the comfort of our armchairs, would like it to or not.

From Bangladesh To The UAE - Labour Conditions To Come Under The Microscope?

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It's not going to be long now before news media work out Bangladesh isn't the only place cheap clothes are being manufactured to stoke the insatiable appetite of the developed world's high streets. And the heat is most definitely on - retailers are being forced to get proactive before the next scandal hits them. They're going to want to be able to prove that their suppliers have at least some minimal level of worker rights and care in place.

With a sigh of relief as H&M, Mango and Primark take the brunt of the opprobrium, the rest of the High Street has been put on high alert.

Quite how conscience stricken the average consumer is remains to be seen - despite media-fuelled outrage at the appalling conditions in Bangladesh, most of us have long known that cheap clothes and consumer electronics come at a price. It's just that we don't have to pay it and as long as it's not being shoved in our faces, we find it convenient to walk by on the other side of the street. Hands up if you own an Apple device. Now hands up if you are perfectly well aware of the suicides of staff employed by Apple contract manufacturer Foxconn.

Take a look at these images from Dhaka, whose leather industry is one of the most appalling and polluted environments in the world, where workers are dying, poisoned by the toxic cocktails created by the medieval processes and conditions that prevail there. The human price, The Guardian tells us, is 'intolerable'. So now you know, are you going to look for the label in that lovely handbag before you buy it to make sure it doesn't say 'Made in Bangladesh'?

Documents recovered from the rubble of Rana Plaza show retailers are buying clothes for up to a tenth of what they retail for in the West. This excellent Reuters report details the economics of cheap labour thanks to order books recovered from the wreckage - Mango buying polo shirts for $4.45 that retail for over ten times that in the UK. Also, interestingly, Mango sells those shirts for the equivalent number of Pounds to Euro, a mirror of the annoying practice of just changing the $ to a £ tag and letting the Brits consequently pay loads more for the same stuff.

But it's not just Bangladesh. There are sweatshops all over the world, from Mexico to Ajman and Szechuan to Sharjah where workers live in conditions far removed from the halogen lamps and sleek shelving of those glittering stores that sell us not just clothing but aspiration, the dream of a lifestyle lived in that one unforgettable moment of joy. Secured by immersion in the brand, clinched by the act of buying.

It's mildly ironic, is it not, that the top on sale in that gleaming Dubai mall could have been made in a warehouse in Ajman, shipped to the UK or US and then shipped back here again?

I'm not saying for one second the UAE's garment factories are in the same league as Dhaka's tanneries or the mass grave that was Rana Plaza. But godowns packed with Asian (mostly, as far as I can see, Sri Lankan) women on minimal wages working long hours and housed in soulless labour camps turning out piles of cheap clothing for top high street European and US brands are to be found both in the industrial areas and free zones of both Emirates. It's going to be interesting to see if they change their working practices voluntarily, as the result of that roving media spotlight or because a newly image-conscious UAE imposes regulation on them. Of the three, of course, the former is by far the preferable.

The only question is whether they're smart enough to see it coming...

Labour to let

Image via Wikipedia
Driving past the infamous Sonapour labour camp, you can only be struck by the To Let signs up on the accommodation blocks. A closer inspection reveals a large number of the blocks have gaps in the walls where window ACs should be. It's almost quiet on the roads around the camp in the mornings and evenings, where once clouds of dust would be thrown up by manic bus drivers taking shortcuts or slinging their loads of tired workers around the sandy parking spaces around the cluster of blocks that sits north of the big graveyard (the roadsigns used to read 'Labour Camp / Graveyard' until someone finally worked out that this was a form of irony) on the Emirates Road.

We're seeing the occasional 'labourers stranded' story in the local press still, although the worst of these recently, 700 labourers stranded with no money or resources after the Dubai-based construction company's chairman fled, relates to labourers in Sharjah's labour camp, not Sonapour.

A lot of the projects that still went ahead when the recession hit (or, to be more accurate, when Dubai stopped pushing its fingers in its ears and going lalalalala rather than accept a recession had hit) did so because they had gone too far to cancel - it simply made more sense to finish them than kill them off. Those projects are starting to be finished now and as each one does, it is likely that there will be precious little to replace it. So many of the construction workers who got a reprieve over the past couple of years are likely to get laid off and sent home.

That second wave of redundancies will see even more To Let signs up in Sonapour. Let's hope it doesn't lead to another wave of 'workers stranded' stories.

Minted

As Bill Gates’ visit to the Emirates dominates the newspapers, I’ve dropped my car to Al Habtoor in order that they can gouge me in the traditional, and distressingly regular, gouging spree that is Servicing A Pajero.

Mr. G, our regular cabbie, took me into work and so, as we slowly pushed our way through the choking, aggressive gridlock, he updated me on the dark, subterranean world of the UAE’s taxi drivers. And it’s pretty grim stuff. With all the fuss we’ve seen in the international and even local media about construction labourers and their conditions, it’s strange that nobody’s looked at what the taxi companies are doing. Apparently, drivers are resigning in droves, driven to going back home by a rigidly enforced Dhs 300 per day target and a 16-hour day, 7 day week as well as a system of punitive fines that is surprisingly similar to the labour conditions of industrial revolution Britain. Drivers are fined on a seemingly totally arbitrary basis for not meeting their targets, for any damage to their cars or for pretty much any other reason you can think of.

Their replacements are new labour, recruited fresh from overseas and so not aware of the grim conditions they’ll be working in. And, apparently, a good number are Afghanis carrying (all too easily available, apparently) Pakistani passports.

Mr. G’s particularly upset that 'the company' took Dhs 400 from him recently. When he asked why, it turned out it was the fee for a mandatory training course he had been given. When on leave recently, he’d had a tooth pulled and the operation had gone wrong and complications delayed his return to work. He turned up back in the UAE week late, having faxed to say he would, with a doctor’s report. The subsequent Dhs 1,500 fine was finally reduced to Dhs 500 after much bargaining.

There has been a spate of robberies from cabs in Sharjah, something like 13 car windows smashed in December alone, apparently. No, I didn’t see the headlines, either. But what really got me about this was the fact that Mr. G knows one of the drivers who was burgled and he was robbed not once but twice. For, once the police had come and taken a report then gone, the car company fined the driver Dhs 300.

There was plenty more along these lines as we sat in the traffic. So why stay? I asked him. I’m not, he replied. The second this visa’s up, I’m off.

Fair enough. But if Mr G is to be believed (and he’s an honest cove with no particular reason to slip me a line) there are thousands of these men out there working these mad hours, in a state of dangerous tiredness, for pennies - and being (illegally?) fined at every turn by the companies that employ them.

Update: Those Lucky Workers!

Here's the link to that wonderful story in Xpress about labour accommodation.

Dubai Workers Enjoy Five Star Lifestyle

This morning's Xpress, the weekly magapaper thingy from Al Nisr Media, carries a front cover story that had me feeling distinctly uneasy.

I'd link to the image splashed across the front page, of four workers 'unwinding in the gym', except the website doesn't have this week's issue on it yet. But believe me, it's there. Four wooden looking blokes who don't look at all like they've just been thrown in there for the photographer, using the latest in walking/pedalling/weight lifting machinery. I'm not quite sure why I find the image staged and unsettling. Perhaps it's because we all see these blokes labouring in the heat and humidity shifting wheelbarrows, blocks and rebar by the tonne. What more could you want after a hard day labouring in the sun than a smashing workout to really get those muscles toned, after all?

The story attached to this worrying image is even more fascinating. Apparently the ETA Ascon labour camp in the infamous Sonapur labour camp area is one of the leading 'top class' labour camps with facilities that 'rival those of the city's exclusive gated communities' according to the paper. While any improvement in labour standards has to be a good thing (and Dubai Municipality has moved to regulate for better standards), one would be forgiven for being rather taken aback at this absurd comparison.

Akbar Khan, executive director at ETA Ascon, dismisses a suggestion that improvements in labour accommodation are due to negative press about workers' living conditions. Surrounded by pictures of the awkward-looking labourers posed in their bunk beds or outside in the labour camp, the assertion somehow fails to make its mark.

The ETA Ascon camp not only has a gym, ATMs and other facilities. It also has 62 CCTV cameras according to Xpress. I think this fact alone speaks to my general sense of unease at the story.

It would be so much more impressive to see a more deftly communicated proposition from the companies involved, with less staged pictures and less obviously credulous journalism. Then the fact that improvements are taking place would carry infinitely more credibility.