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UAE Built It's Economy Using Indian, Pakistani and Bengali Slave Labour

Kharian_Beast

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Another reason why I dislike sand surfers and their oppressive regimes. :angry: :guns: :tsk:

UAE site workers are slaves, says lobby group

17 April 2009

By Roxane McMeeken

A pressure group has set out to prove that the conditions of building site workers in the UAE meet the legal definition of slavery, as the row over workers’ treatment in the region intensifies.

Nicholas McGeehan (pictured), the British founder of web-based lobby organisation Mafiwasta, has begun a PhD that aims to prove that in legal terms migrant workers in the country’s construction and oil industries are enslaved. He has funding from the European University Institute in Italy.

The news follows similar allegations in the BBC’s Panorama programme last week and comes amid growing pressure on UK firms working in the region to improve the lot of workers.

McGeehan said: “When they arrive their passports are confiscated. This was made illegal in 2002, but it is still the norm. They are not allowed to strike or form trade unions and they often don’t have sanitary accommodation. We also know of many instances where workers are sleeping 20 to a room.”

He added that workers, many of whom come from the Indian subcontinent, typically have to take out loans of about £1,350 to pay recruitment agents in their home countries, as well as visa and travel costs. It can take workers as long as three-and-a-half years to repay this money.

Workers earn up to 30 dirhams (£5.55) a day, and generally work six days a week.

McGeehan said UK firms “should bear some of the responsibility” for workers’ conditions and called on them to lobby to improve the situation.

He said: “Part of me wants to stick the boot into UK firms and say they should just pull out but we have to be more realistic – they are businesses and this is one of the best construction markets in the world.

“I’m not going give them a free pass, though; they have to use their influence at least on the projects they are involved with.”

His comments were backed by Amnesty International UK, which said: “Abiding by local laws is not enough: companies have a duty to respect human rights and could easily find themselves exposed if they fail to do so.”

UK contractors operating in the UAE distanced themselves from the allegations by Panorama. An anonymous source at a British contractor in the region said: “I am very proud of our camps. Our camps have good facilities, they are clean and we are proud of the food there.

“Our workers’ passports are not held by employment agents, they are held in fireproof safes in our head office and workers can collect them when they want to leave or take holiday.”

UAE site workers are slaves, says lobby group - Building

As South Asians, we must speak out for those of our citizens being tricked into slave labour. Their bad situations in our own countries is not an excuse for outside forces to manipulate and exploit our citizens. Pakistanis, Indians, Bangalis, Sri Lankans please take note of how your countrymen and not the sheikhs are responsible for the economic boom of many middle eastern countries notably UAE.




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That has always been the case, people were taken as slaves. But not only people: PIA supported Emirates when it was founded and now we are kinda slaves of the big airlines.
 
That has always been the case, people were taken as slaves. But not only people: PIA supported Emirates when it was founded and now we are kinda slaves of the big airlines.

It is sad when the UAE, etc. can steal and keep the passports of South Asian citizens to keep them from running away from slave life and our useless governments will never come to their rescue or raise a concern. We talk bad about western governments when in fact they wouldn't hesitate in carpet bombing a nation in defense of their people, anywhere at any time. :usflag:
 
I am not supporting Arabs, but then when you all know these why still ****, indian and bangla people go over there? No one put gun on their head to go and work. If you don't live like animal in other country then live in your country. Simple!
 
American system is very best in these things, atleast they don't treat you like peace of **** there.
 
While this is true and abhorrent, as are all instances of exploitation, lets not express indigence at the expense of introspection. The reason so many South Asian laborers go to these countries despite all the grueling hardships is because their home countries offer even less.
Before one points the finger at the ostensibly predatory and exploitative Arab policies there needs to be a comparison with what this cohort of people have to face in their homelands. South Asia despite being one of the most densely populated areas in the world maintains a very poor history of human development. And while invasions, colonialism, natural calamities and other external sources have certainly been contributory factors, there is no denying that there are some very serious and deep rooted endemic problems. Problems so severe that risking conditions addressed in the article is actually a better option for many than not doing so.
 
American system is very best in these things, atleast they don't treat you like peace of **** there.

Unless you're ill without insurance, and forced to fend for yourself...

It's nice being an American, when you're a degree holder with one of the top jobs that few 'white trash' could dream of, or you're able to make money by driving cabs, something many American born are loath to do.

But step away from teh main boulevards, into the side lanes, and the suburbs of American towns. It's a completely different picture.

Not every city is New York, and not every state California.
 
This is propoganda, and God knows what situation with those people sleeping like packed sardines really is.

Slavery in America...visit the southern states, where mexican families, including children, are working on farms, being paid a pittance, and too afraid of their illegal status to do anything to improve their lot, and follow the 'American Dream".
 
Can u name any state where children put to work? Well off course coming Illegal in this country and still getting tons of benefits isn't that great or what? For example free food stamps, health insurance and tons of other stuff which legal American cannot even afford they are getting it with paying no tax to state. So don't you think that America is at least better then those courtiers which don't even care about their own people, forget about coming to a country as illegal immigrants anyways...
 
Of course, green card holders and naturalised Americans, wouldn't agree.

IF Americans are so generous, why don't they legalise all these people without papers? Was this not always done until the Reagan years? Why the change now? Because your farmers don't want this to happen.

The irony is, that most of these states were Mexican, and forcefully occupied by the European White Americans. Now they have become illegal in their own land, forced to travel to America, because of the adverse affects of US policy, such as the NAFTA agreement.
 
America's Secret World of Child Labor
by David Foster and Farrell Kramer, Associated Press Writers

Fifty-nine years after Congress outlawed child labor in its most onerous forms, underage children still toil in fields and factories scattered across America.

The poorest and most vulnerable among them start working before other children start kindergarten. Many earn wages below the legal minimum, often in exhausting, or even hazardous, jobs.

These children live in a world apart from most Americans, hidden from consumers and even the companies that buy the products of their labor. Yet those products can sometimes be as close as the local mall or the corner grocery.

In the past five months, The Associated Press found 165 children working illegally in 16 states, from the chili fields of New Mexico to the sweatshops of New York City.

They are children such as Angel Oliveras, 4, who stumbled between chili pepper plants as tall as his chin in New Mexico's fall harvest. Children such as Vielesee Cassell, 13, who spent the summer folding and bagging dresses in a Texas sweatshop. Children such as Bruce Lawrence, at 8 already a three-year veteran of Florida's bean fields.

The AP was able to follow the work products of 50 children to more than two dozen companies including Campbell Soup Co., Chi-Chi's Mexican restaurants, ConAgra, Costco, H.J. Heinz, Newman's Own, J.C. Penney, Pillsbury, Sears and Wal-Mart.

All the companies that responded condemned illegal child labor. Many launched investigations when told of suppliers employing underage children.

"If they are, that's against the law and they're gone -- they don't supply to Campbell Soup Co.,'' said spokesman Kevin Lowery.

Although the number of children traced to any one company was small, there are uncounted thousands of boys and girls like Angel, Vielesee and Bruce. No one knows just how many because no one, the federal government included, has tried to count them all. all.

To make an estimate, the AP had Rutgers University labor economist Douglas L. Kruse analyze monthly census surveys and other workplace and population data collected by the federal government.

His study estimates that 290,200 children were employed unlawfully last year. Some were older teens working a few too many hours in after-school jobs. But also among them were 59,600 children under age 14 and 13,100 who worked in garment sweatshops, defined as factories with repeated labor violations.

Other estimates:

Close to 4 percent of all 12- to 17-year-olds working in any given week were employed illegally.

Employers saved $155 million in wages last year by hiring underage children instead of legal workers.

Kruse's study could not account for all children who work illegally because available data are limited. For example, census-takers, like labor enforcement agents, have trouble finding the very kids who are among the most easily exploited: children of migrant workers, illegal immigrants and the very young.

Even so, U.S. Labor Secretary Alexis Herman called the study more comprehensive than anything her department had produced.

She said the AP's numbers, and the young faces behind them, highlight a home-grown version of what the Clinton administration and corporate leaders have addressed largely as a foreign problem.

"I don't think that we can lead from a position of integrity and be a world leader if our own domestic house is not in order,'' she said.

Jim Sinegal, president of Costco Wholesale Corp., said his company has monitored overseas suppliers for years to avoid products made with child labor.

However, the company acknowledged buying cherries from a packing plant in Washington state where Flor Trujillo, 15, and six other child workers under 16 were sickened by carbon monoxide last July. Children under 16 are prohibited by federal law from working in such plants.

"We obviously have to take a look a little closer to home,'' Sinegal said.

Look to a bustling street in New York City's borough of Queens, where Koon-yu Chow, 15, was found stitching dresses at a garment factory sewing machine last summer. Dresses were being made for Betsy's Things, a label sold at Sears, until state labor investigators inspected the place and Betsy's Things took its business elsewhere.

Walk into Grayson Sewing in Sherman, Texas. There, Vielesee was one of seven children federal investigators found folding and bagging dresses up to 12 hours a day. All seven were under 14; the youngest was 9. J.C. Penney acknowledged making two purchases of garments from Grayson, a company investigators called a sweatshop.

Rise before dawn to join Angel and six other children under 12 in a New Mexico field.

"Hurry up, son,'' Angel's mother called. ``It's time to pick.''

The 4-year-old pushed back an adult-sized baseball cap from his eyes and turned to the work that would occupy him for the next eight hours on this October day: yanking chilies from the plants and dropping them with hollow thumps into his mother's bucket.


Follow the chilies, and the trail leads to Texas, to a processor that makes Old El Paso salsa for Pillsbury. The processor also supplies a California plant operated by Cantisano Foods, which makes salsa for the Newman's Own label.

Told of this by the AP, actor Paul Newman, founder of the company, flew to New Mexico last weekend to investigate. Cantisano said that, at Newman's request, it had stopped doing business with the Texas supplier.

If his company can't ensure that ingredients are produced without child labor, Newman said, "we'll have to eliminate the product.''

Newman said the situation is ironic, considering that his company gave $9 million to charities this year, much of it to help children.

"Even though we weren't aware of these infractions, I suppose we should have been,'' he said. In a later interview, he added, "What you found is probably significant.''


-----
A century ago, more than 2 million children labored in America's factories, fields and mines. The wisdom of the day regarded them as miniature adults, each one a potential Horatio Alger hero who could rise to riches through hard work and perseverance.
In the early 1900s, however, public opinion moved toward a dimmer view of child labor: Too much work, too young, robs children of an education and condemns them to a lifetime of poverty and missed opportunity.

In 1938, Congress declared an end to ``oppressive child labor,'' the most onerous forms of children's work, by enacting the Fair Labor Standards Act.

Since its passage, child labor has declined, although it is far from eradicated. Kruse's study, which began with 1970s figures, shows the number of illegal child workers dropping until recently, but leveling off since 1995.

The 1938 law set age minimums designed to ease children into the adult world of work. Those minimums remain at the heart of federal child labor law:

Children must wait until age 16 to work in factories or during school hours.

Children under 14 are barred from most jobs except farming.

Children under 12 are banned from most farming jobs but can work on their parents' farm or on a small farm exempt from federal minimum-wage laws.


Children under 18, or under 16 on farms, are barred from a list of jobs deemed hazardous.

Responsibility extends beyond the child's employer. Under the federal law, the taint of illegal child labor clings to a product from the workplace to the final packager or distributor.

Toss a bucket of cucumbers picked on an Ohio farm by 10-year-old Laura Mares into a truckload harvested by adults, and the entire load becomes ``hot goods.'' So do any pickles or relish made from it.

Even with such strong laws, America's youngest workers remain among us. Drive past the right farm at the right time of year, walk down the right street, and there they are. In New York City, for example, young teens in work boots wait on a busy Brooklyn boulevard, peddling their labor to construction bosses who cruise by in vans.

Despite agriculture's more relaxed labor standards, it was on farms that the AP most often found illegal child labor, including the most extreme cases: the youngest workers toiling the longest hours for the least pay.

Reporters saw 104 children working illegally in agriculture in the past five months -- nearly three times the 35 that U.S. Labor Department inspectors witnessed nationwide last year, according to the department's computer records.

Underage children picked cucumbers in Michigan, green peppers in Tennessee, and apples in upstate New York. Their grape-cutting knives flashed in the sunny vineyards of California, and their head lamps bobbed in the gloomy mushroom sheds of Pennsylvania. They packed peaches into crates in Illinois and hoed sorghum in Lubbock, Texas.

On a simmering July day near Bowling Green, Ohio, Pasqual Mares looked sadly at his 10-year-old daughter Laura, her back bent over a row of cucumbers. In a full week of harvest work, Mares said, he and his wife and their two working children had earned just $120 -- far below the normal minimum wage.

"Someday, I want my children to be treated like human beings, not like animals,'' he said. "It's not right that the children work. But we have to do it.''

In a New Mexico field, Maria Perez watched her 10-year-old son Victor pick chilies. "I like him to work in the fields with me because I want him to learn that this work is hard, hot and laborious,'' she said. "I want him to hate this, to stay in school and to study hard so he doesn't have to do this work.''

Victor was one of 35 children under age 12 seen picking chilies in the fields of New Mexico and west Texas. Laura Mares was among 34 kids under 12 spotted in Ohio's cucumber rows.

In the bean fields near Homestead, Fla., the Lawrence kids -- Bruce, 8, Angie, 10, and Benjamin, 11 -- were among eight children under 12 picking beans one November morning.

"No kids in the field -- especially when we've got reporters here,'' a crew boss at one Homestead field yelled out. Surprised parents said it was the first they'd been told that children weren't allowed.

Some employers on whose property the AP saw underage children working denied breaking the law, even when presented with photographs of the activity. Others blamed the kids and their parents.

"We tell them that we don't want children in the fields,'' said Tim Reynolds, whose family runs the farm where Laura worked. ``But you know, migrant laborers want their kids out there. They get more produce picked.''


Far from being anomalies, those young faces are windows into a larger, seldom-seen population of child workers, say those most familiar with child labor, including migrant-education workers, union organizers, priests and school teachers.

"They are in the dark alleys of the big cities,'' or ``down a dirt road,'' said Linda F. Golodner, co-chairwoman of the Washington-based Child Labor Coalition.

But the products they produce can make their way to the store down the street.

Some Wal-Mart ``supercenters'' sell Sugar Lake Farms chicken nuggets and patties produced by Braselton Poultry in Braselton, Ga. That's where David Osorio, 15, used a fake ID saying he was 21 to get a job cutting up chickens instead of going to school. Asked about David last month, Braselton found that his ID was fake and fired him.

H.J. Heinz buys some of its chicken from Chestertown Foods, according to Chestertown plant manager Jack Laird. Filomena Simon Perez, 15, worked cutting up chickens at the Maryland processing plant, which also sells to Campbell. She was one of six undocumented workers under 16 found when U.S. immigration agents raided Chestertown in September.

ConAgra, which makes Rosarita salsa, acknowledged buying chili peppers from a distributor supplied by a New Mexico farm where eight children, ages 3 to 11, were seen working in September. Chi-Chi's, a Mexican restaurant chain owned by Family Restaurants, said it gets chilies from the same source.

Campbell confirmed it buys mushrooms from a farm in Chester County, Pa., which this fall employed Jose Ortiz, age 14. While other kids his age were in school, Jose picked mushrooms eight hours a day in a dark building that smelled of manure.


------
For some companies, this was not their first alert to child labor.

The U.S. Labor Department says Grayson Sewing, the J.C. Penney supplier, has been the subject of three workplace investigations since 1993.

Ohio cucumber growers supplying Campbell were sued in 1993 by migrant workers who claimed the farmers concealed child laborers by assigning their earnings to adults. The suit was settled for $200,000. At Heinz, purchasing agent Ronald Brooks said the company has worked for years to get farm workers' kids out of the fields and into decent housing or day care.

"We take the issue very seriously,'' Brooks said. "It's not totally new and foreign to us.''

Some companies, including Wal-Mart, Cantisano, Sears and Chi-Chi's, said they would never knowingly buy from anyone employing children illegally.

"Any U.S. grower found to be in violation of U.S. labor laws will have its contract terminated, ''Chi-Chi's parent company, Family Restaurants, said in a written statement.

Several companies, including J.C. Penney and H.J. Heinz, said they have begun investigations of their suppliers.

ConAgra's Hunt-Wesson unit, which makes Rosarita salsa, contacted its chili supplier and was "very comfortable that they were addressing any issue that might be there,'' said Hunt-Wesson spokesman Kay Carpenter.

Pillsbury checked with its supplier, said company spokesman Rob Longendyke, and was told children had been in the New Mexico chili fields with their families but were not working.

"If you have evidence otherwise,'' he said, "we will take action.''

America's Secret World of Child Labor
 
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Unless you're ill without insurance, and forced to fend for yourself...

It's nice being an American, when you're a degree holder with one of the top jobs that few 'white trash' could dream of, or you're able to make money by driving cabs, something many American born are loath to do.

But step away from teh main boulevards, into the side lanes, and the suburbs of American towns. It's a completely different picture.

Not every city is New York, and not every state California.
Your representation of the US is hardly accurate. While the lack of insurance is undoubtedly a highly politicized issue and a convenient source of leverage for the left; US medical institutions provide more charity care than anywhere else in the world. Taking the size and population ratio into account the US blows everyone else right out of the water as far as medical care is concerned all the way up to level III trauma. I trained at a tertiary level 1500 bed institution that exclusively provided state of the art care to an inner city financially downtrodden populace including a vast number of unemployed illegal immigrants who could never even dream of obtaining such for themselves or their children in their respective homelands.

Most of the people who do all the crying here don't know how much worse it is elsewhere, including Canada, the common populist icon for "free" healthcare.

The "white trash" comment is also baseless. The US' workforce is bar none the most equitable and meritocratic system in the world. Don't believe me? Ask the millions of people lined up in front of US embassies and consulates all over the world. The success of integration is also way superior to all other comparative migratory grounds like Western Europe, Australia or Japan.
 
A four year old working in the USA...it's heart wrenching...even i've never heard of that in Indo-Pak, or Dubai for that matter.
 
Integration would be better, since America is a Nation of Immigrants, unlike Euopean nation states.

Do you even know how many millions of uninsured Americans there are?

They do not get state of the art treatement, cancer treatment, heart transplants...

I know, because I've been to teh States, and have close relatives working as Doctors and Pharmacists.

People are begging to get free prescriptions, because of the prhobitive cost of even visiting a doctor to prescribe one piece of medicine.

The profits enjoyed by the medical and pharmaceutical industries are obscene, and any 'charity' they 'do' from all that windfall is inconsequential.

And brusing off the problem as left created nonsense is quite disingenuous.

If you want to see a proper insurance based health system, come visit France/Belgium/German/Holland...We have the statre of the art technology, and first rate treatement and care...with no hole in the net...Everyone gets covered, even if you're unemployed, or illegal.
 

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