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Bangladeshi workers faced harsh conditions at NYU's Abu Dhabi site

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That is how the numbers work on paper; in reality they are far worse. Almost all of the several dozen workers interviewed, working for a variety of companies and living at a half-dozen labour camps, said that a recruiter back home charged them about a year's wages to land them the jobs. (Recruitment fees are widespread in the UAE, despite being officially illegal; Human Rights Watch calls them "the single greatest factor in creating conditions of forced labour.”)
The City Falcon workers, like all the men interviewed, said they were not allowed to keep their own passports. A group of labourers in a nearby apartment who had recently finished installing furniture on the Saadiyat Island campus said they were not even allowed to hold their own bank cards. To get cash they have to ask the man they called the "owner": the recruiter who brought them over from Bangladesh, who sleeps in the room with them.
Attempts to reach City Falcon managers were not successful.
BK Gulf, the company whose workers went on strike last October, said it was "obliged by confidentiality clauses to make no comment whatsoever without the express permission of our client." Mubadala, the government entity overseeing the construction of the NYU campus, said it would not comment on any aspect of the project CHALLENGING THE SYSTEM
By laying out its standards for labour in a country with no tradition of workers' rights, NYU took on a considerable challenge - one that many companies in the region are content to ignore. Sustaining the academic freedom that is a core value of its New York campus will pose a similar challenge. In both cases, the challenge is made more complex by the fact that the university is in effect a guest of the ruling family, which has not only paid for the 21 -building campus and for generous tuition subsidies, but also has contributed the first of what are expected to be several $50 million donations to NYU as a whole.
In recent years, the United Arab Emirates, which has been accused of torturing political prisoners, has intensified its crackdown on dissent. And though neighboring Qatar, which is preparing for the 2022 World Cup, recently announced reforms to the kafala system, in UAE it remains firmly in place.
On some of the labour protections that NYU set forth, including a ban on child labour and a requirement that workers get free transportation to their job sites, The Times's reporting turned up no violations.
Margaret Bavuso, the executive director of campus operations for NYU Abu Dhabi, said she had worked closely with contractors and the government of Abu Dhabi to ensure better conditions than labourers in the UAE could otherwise expect. "The government has become much, much more responsive in the time that we've been here," she said, citing among other things new rules to ban outdoor work during the hottest hours of the hottest months.
She is especially proud of the university's safety record, achieved in part through a program that rewards workers who notice potential hazards. According to the university, only one worker has died, and its accident rate - 0.03 accidents per 100,000 work hours - was far lower than at other large-scale construction jobs, including Olympic Park in London, which had a rateof0.16.
At one of the recent safety awards ceremonies, Bavuso said, Al Bloom, the vice chancellor of NYU Abu Dhabi, addressed thousands of labourers who had come from countries like India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Nepal. Bavuso says he told them: "All of you have worked so very hard on this project. Your children are benefiting from the work that you do on this project. There is no reason that those children, as they get educated in your country, that they can't apply to go to school here. And just think about how exciting it would be for them to attend a school that you built."
Beckman, the NYU spokesman, disputed that some workers are not paid a living wage. "Wages on the NYUAD project are designed to place workers at the top of the range in their respective categories," he said.
But in a separate interview, Bavuso said that beyond setting forth the broad principle of fair compensation, NYU does not actually monitor what the construction companies pay their workers, nor should it. "We're not involved in the negotiation of the contracts that the partners are doing, just as they're not in the negotiation of the contracts that we're doing,” she said. "We have a relationship with our partners, and so we have to trust that what they're coming up with are the reasonable wages on their end.”
NYU officials said that no complaints had been raised about the treatment of the security guards, cafeteria cooks and secretaries who staffed NYU Abu Dhabi's temporary location while its permanent campus was being built. Over the years, 19 of them were identified as having paid a recruitment fee, and they were reimbursed, officials said.
As for the men who were building the new campus - who outnumber those nonconstruction staff members by about 30 to 1 -- Bavuso drew a distinction. Construction workers who "were recruited for this job," she said, are treated with the same protections as the university's own staff. But that is not possible, she said, fora worker brought over by a construction company and moved from site to site.
The construction workers, however, did not describe having been recruited for any particular job site. They say they were recruited by manpower agencies or by construction companies that, like most large contractors, have people stationed at several job sites. The men might spend five months on one project, two years on another, just going where they are sent. With major construction at NYU now concluded, most workers have moved on to other job sites. Those who were arrested for striking are back in their