Supercommunity by E-Flux Julieta Aranda Brian Kuan Wood Anton Vidokle & Brian Kuan Wood & Anton Vidokle

Author:E-Flux,Julieta Aranda,Brian Kuan Wood,Anton Vidokle & Brian Kuan Wood & Anton Vidokle
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Random House LLC (Publisher Services)

SIX

In 1980, the UAE outlawed recruitment fees. The law applied to any “employment agent or labor supplier,” and included “any commission or material reward in return for employment, or … expenses thereby incurred.”10 In 2010, new policies enabled the Ministry of Labor to force companies and individuals to reimburse such fees, whether paid inside or outside the UAE. Saadiyat has its own body of regulations, the Employment Practice Policy, which further prohibits loading migrant workers with recruitment debt. In 2011, the Tourism Development and Investment Company of Saadiyat appointed monitors to report back on implementation at their projects on the island.

In 2014, PricewaterhouseCoopers’s third annual report stated that 88 percent of employees currently working on Saadiyat paid recruitment costs and were not reimbursed for them.11 I was present in March 2014 when a “TDIC official who did not wish to be named, observed: ‘If there is a worker who said they have not paid a recruitment fee, I would not believe him.’”12 Meanwhile, Nouvel’s Louvre is completing construction with thousands of men entrapped this way by Arabtec, a private company in which the government has a controlling stake.

Marx noted that, as industrialization developed in England, the legal working day lengthened and conditions worsened. In response, “Parliament passed five Labour Laws between 1802 and 1833, but was shrewd enough not to vote a penny for their compulsory implementation, for the necessary official personnel, etc.”13 It took the 1847 Factory Act to establish a ten-hour working day. The UAE has recently increased the number of labor inspectors, with markedly little effect. The UAE has also beaten and deported workers at the NYU site that complained, and expelled or banned humanitarian and academic labor specialists from the campus and the country.

Marx added an apposite footnote to the remark above: “It is very characteristic of the regime of Louis Philippe … that the one Factory Act passed during his reign … was never put in force.” Actions to enforce “this law are, in a country where every mouse is under police administration, left to the goodwill of the amis du commerce.”14

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