A major museum director, who requested anonymity, has just sent me this link to a BBC story that had been published just two days after my post detailing serious human rights questions recently raised about construction workers’ conditions in the United Arab Emirates, where an ambitious four-museum project in Abu Dhabi is planned.
Tim Mansel reports:
They [construction workers] work for about $5 a day, sleep four or five to a room, and see their families once every two or three years because it’s hard to raise the money to pay for a trip home….
There’s little that workers in the United Arab Emirates can do to improve their lot. Strikes are illegal, although there have been several recently. And because there is no right of association, there are no trade unions….
Organizations like the World Bank and the IMF, as well as the United States have all made clear that they want the UAE to improve labour conditions. The government has now responded by saying that a new labour law being drawn up will allow workers to organise. Current plans, according to the minister of labour, envisage a single union with separate representatives for different industries.
The minister has said he expects the proposed law to be in place by the end of the year.
Human Rights Watch has weighed in negatively on a draft of the proposed labor law that was released for comment in February.
Should the Louvre, the Guggenheim, and the starchitects who have designed the four planned museums have assured themselves of humane conditions for construction workers before green-lighting these projects? Or is this as an internal matter for the UAE to resolve?
You can weigh in here.