Andrew Ross talking:
I was denied permission to board the flight when I got to the airport and I asked for reasons and they called the UAE authorities and I was told that I was barred from entry to the country for security reasons. There was no other reason given for that.
there is no doubt in my mind. I have been researching abuses of migrant laborers in the country, in the UAE, for some time and I was traveling to do research on that very topic that week. When I was there before, I was followed by security agents in a car and, a private investigator has been looking into my affairs so it wasn’t entirely surprising to me.
One of the people she(private investigator) called up, contacted me to let me know. I don’t know if that was the only person she called.
Ariel Kaminer, her independent research, the article; but it was a very important article because — it was so important that it was not printed, the newspaper was not printed in the Emirates that day. It was the first time the New York Times was actually banned from circulation. When the investigator called this contact, she prefaced the inquiry by saying that this was in connection with the pressure that was currently on NYU’s president regarding the allegations of labor abuse in Abu Dhabi. So, it was quite clear that this was the context for the investigation.
in the New York Times there is a series of pieces written by independent journalists over the years and Human Rights Watch reports and also reports by the Gulf Labor Coalition which I work with. I am part of Gulf Labor which is a group of artists and writers that put pressure on the Guggenheim Museum because the Guggenheim is also building in Abu Dhabi. Through our investigations we have discovered a fairly consistent pattern of fair labor standards violations and human rights abuses among the migrant work force in the UAE and also in Qatar, neighboring Qatar, because it’s the same migrant-labor sponsorship system that brings workers from South Asia to these two countries and it’s a very harsh system.
the fair labor statement, the Statement of Labor Values was established largely through pressure from a group of us at NYU, a group of faculty and students, it wasn’t something administration took on by itself; and having these standards on paper, as it were, is all very well, but, the enforcement is the more important thing. As we know, the U.S. has perfectly good labor laws, it could be better, but they are perfectly good, but, they are just not enforced. So, it is the enforcement of them where people fell down on the job.
As far as the argument about subcontracting, this is pretty much the same argument that Nike and the Gap used to make, the origins of the anti-sweatshop movement. This is not our problem, we have no responsibility for what happens further down the subcontracting chain. There is a very tight, rigid sense of responsibility in my mind and in most peoples’ minds and the barring of entry to researchers, especially NYU professors like myself, has some serious implications for the operation of the campus overseas in Abu Dhabi.
migrant workers in tiny apartment in Abu Dhabi earn as little as $272 a month while building a campus for New York University. It wasn’t surprising to us, though. Us, by which I mean the faculty and students who have been pushing for adequate enforcement of these labor values. The administration at NYU has hired an independent investigator to look into the allegations and that report will be forthcoming very soon. It will be very interesting to see what they come up with. Very difficult to investigate these allegations unless you go to India or Bangladesh or Pakistan where the workers were deported to after they spoke up about their grievances. This is typically the case with strikes or work stoppages in the UAE. The workers are rounded up and detained, abused, often beaten and then deported without a cent in their pockets. So, to properly investigate these allegations you would need to go and interview those workers which some of us have done, some of our group have done, but I very much doubt if the independent investigator has done that.
It’s not the university’s money. Everything is being bankrolled by the UAE. An immense amount of money is being allocated to buy these cultural assets. But, it’s not like purchasing property on Central Park South or Mayfair. When you buy a university and a top ranked museum, there are a lot of speech protections and artistic freedom protections that have to come with it and that is part of the problem when you start muzzling the voices of those who start making inquiries into conditions in the country.
the train already left the station on that. The decision was made, they are building the buildings. But, they have a lot of responsibilities going in. The question is, have the voices, have the directors and the presidents of these institutions, have their voices been bought and paid for as well, because so far the president ofNYU has had nothing to say about the recent incidents.
— source democracynow.org
Andrew Ross, sociology professor at NYU and president of NYU’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors. He was recently barred from entering the United Arab Emirates after he criticized the monarchy’s exploitation of migrant laborers. Author of several books, including most recently “Creditocracy and the Case for Debt Refusal.”