Exploitative System in UAE: Human Rights Documentation Reveals Plight of Foreign Workers
Human rights documentation has confirmed that foreign workers in the UAE find themselves victims of a restrictive and exploitative system known as sponsorship, which causes numerous documented violations.
The documentation said that the high recruitment fees, exorbitant debt, confiscation of passports, risk of flight, and replacement of contracts are the minimum expressions to describe the situation of the foreign workers in the Emirates.
Documentation issued by Americans for Democracy and Human Rights confirmed that continued violations against foreign workers mean Abu Dhabi’s continued violation of its obligations in the field of human rights.
The UAE holds the world’s highest proportion of international migrants, totaling 8.7 million workers who comprise 88% of its population.
These migrants, who are mainly low-wage and semi-skilled, are regulated by the kafala system, widely recognized for its documented instances of restrictive practices and exploitation.
After Saudi Arabia, the UAE ranks as the second most popular destination for migrants in the Middle East and Gulf region. Alongside India, it forms the world’s third-largest migration corridor.
In this context, as of 2020, around 3.5 million Indians, over 1 million Bangladeshis, more than 950,000 Pakistanis, 710,000 Egyptians, and 470,000 Filipinos were estimated to be residing in the UAE, based on data from the United Nations in 2013.
These nationalities therefore make up the top five regions of origin of the foreign workforce in the country, although the number of Nepalis who traveled to the UAE for work in 2022 was greater than the number of Bangladeshis.
In this pattern, the UAE emerged as Asia’s top remittance sender in both 2019 and 2020, with remittance totals of US$45 billion and US$43 billion, respectively.
Furthermore, it should be noted that migrant workers constitute more than 90% of private sector employees in the UAE.
Alongside this data, some depressing statistics reveal a harsh reality: in 2021, there were 132,000 individuals living in modern slavery in the UAE.
In this context, there is a need to introduce a specific system that regulates labor migration to the UAE, a system that has been in place in the GCC and other Middle Eastern countries for decades: the kafala system.
The contemporary sponsorship system originated in the Gulf states during the early twentieth century to oversee the treatment of foreign workers in the pearl industry. Its scope expanded in the 1950s to meet the demand for immigrants to participate in extensive infrastructure projects driven by newfound oil wealth in the region.
Due to the Gulf States’ modest population size, the kafala system aimed to facilitate the swift entry of temporary labor during economic upswings and their departure during downturns.
To this day, this system still defines the relationship between migrant workers and their employers – the local sponsor or sponsor – in the Gulf Cooperation Council countries.
Originally, the system prioritized Arab workers from nearby nations like Egypt, Yemen, and Palestine. However, during the mid-1980s to mid-1990s, a period marked by austerity due to low oil prices, both public and private sectors resorted to cost-cutting measures, resulting in the substitution of skilled Arab workers with less qualified Asian laborers.
Another reason given for this replacement was the fear that Arab workers would spread an Arab nationalist ideology that could undermine the Gulf monarchies.
Moreover, following the Gulf Crisis in 1990, approximately two million Egyptians, Palestinians, and Yemenis were expelled from the region due to their government’s support for Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. This expulsion also contributed to the decline in the number of Arab workers in the region.
While laws and regulations governing the kafala system differ among countries, it is generally characterized as a restrictive system that ties migrant workers to their employers. This arrangement exacerbates the power disparity between employers and workers, making it difficult for migrant workers to report instances of abuse or exploitation.
This is why certain human rights organizations and activists have likened this system to “modern slavery.” Specifically, the delegation of authority over migrant workers to employers, facilitated through sponsorship permits issued by the state to individuals or local companies hiring foreign workers, grants employers control over aspects such as residence, employment, and departure from the host country.
This level of authority employers hold over workers results in various abuses, including passport confiscation, excessive recruitment fees, extended working hours, inadequate working and living conditions, wage withholding, and more, which will be elaborated upon further.
The sectors in which migrant workers suffer particularly from the risks of forced labor are construction, domestic work, and the service industry.
Another effect of the kafala system is the complete exclusion of migrant workers from integrating into the local community, which in migration studies is called the “differential exclusion model”.
This explains why migrant workers in the UAE suffer, unlike citizens.
They cannot receive government allocations for housing, subsidized health care, or other services, and thus depend on their wages to access basic services.
In addition, there is a less understood role of the kafala system that should be noted: creating a social contract between the state and its citizens, which is a crucial element of the state’s stability.
According to UAE authorities, the kafala system not only supports the preservation of national identity but also delivers significant economic and social advantages to citizens while contributing to a secure and stable society.
This, in other words, means that the UAE grants citizens’ rights and power over immigrants and the wealth they generate – as well as a wide range of social benefits – in exchange for significant restrictions on civil and political liberties.
As a result of the benefits that UAE citizens receive from this labor system, any attempt by the UAE government to reform it by international standards and labor agreements could be seen as a threat to their privileges, and therefore unpopular.
This presents a significant challenge when discussing reforms to a labor system that necessitates addressing broader civil and political reforms.
Without acknowledging fundamental workers’ rights, including freedom of association, collective bargaining, and other union rights, the UAE’s updated labor laws will be ineffective in addressing labor exploitation within the country.
The UAE Labor Law requires that monthly salaries be paid through the Wage Protection System. However, as argued, gaps in law implementation and enforcement continue to make migrant workers vulnerable to trafficking, forced labor, and other exploitative practices.
According to the UAE Labor Law, monthly salaries must be disbursed using the Wage Protection System. Nevertheless, gaps in law enforcement and implementation persist, leaving migrant workers susceptible to trafficking, forced labor, and other forms of exploitation.
The lack of willingness to effectively address labor abuses in the country is evident in the UAE’s perception of human trafficking as an issue limited only to women, children, and sexual exploitation.
Moreover, while the UAE is among three countries with labor laws explicitly prohibiting and criminalizing all forms of forced labor, in practice, accusations of forced labor are typically treated as regulatory infractions. Consequently, companies face penalties such as fines or license revocations rather than criminal prosecution.
The UAE Labor Law also excludes domestic workers, sheepherders, camel breeders, and farm workers, making them more vulnerable to exploitation.
According to the ILO, the recruitment phase of the migration process plays a crucial role in determining whether workers have a favorable migration experience or face exploitation characterized by debt bondage and low wages.
During this phase, private recruitment agencies in the workers’ home countries, contracted by sponsors, play a crucial role as they are solely responsible for recruiting workers and facilitating their entry into the host country.
This practice lies at the heart of fraudulent behavior in the recruitment industry, where exorbitant fees are imposed on low-skilled migrant workers, particularly those in sectors like construction, agriculture, and domestic services.
Despite UAE labor laws prohibiting such fees, the widespread prevalence of this exploitation, coupled with wage theft, forces migrants to borrow money from local lenders at annual interest rates as high as 50%, sell off assets, or deplete family savings.
It is crucial to highlight that migrant workers’ wages are pivotal in exerting control over them, which in turn facilitates other forms of exploitation such as extended working hours without overtime compensation, non-payment or underpayment of wages, and deliberate reduction of wages below contractual terms — commonly referred to as wage theft.
Other fraudulent practices that occur in the hiring process may include:
Debt bondage, linked to the excessive recruitment fees mentioned earlier, occurs when employers deduct or withhold workers’ wages to settle recruitment agency fees. In other instances, employers resort to underpayment or wage theft as punitive measures.
Misrepresentation regarding job nature and conditions, as well as contract substitution, involves discrepancies between the terms of employment initially promised during recruitment in the home country and the actual contract signed upon arrival in the host country. Contract substitution often entails migrants agreeing to inferior wages and working conditions by signing documents in languages they do not comprehend.
In any scenario, the exorbitant fees imposed on low-skilled workers and the violations related to the recruitment process can drastically diminish both the amount workers can spend in the host country and the remittances they can send back home.
Other violations
While it is against the law in the UAE, the absence of penalties for sponsors who confiscate workers’ passports to restrict their movement has made this practice a widespread violation in the country, as exemplified during Expo 2020 Dubai.
Furthermore, workers who leave their employers without permission, including to escape abuse, face penalties for “absconding,” which can lead to fines, detention, and deportation.
To provide a comprehensive view of the common violations experienced by migrant workers, it’s essential to highlight the unsafe working conditions that jeopardize their health and safety, as well as the inadequate and unsanitary housing and living conditions.
The situation of migrant women in the UAE
The unique circumstances faced by migrant women, influenced by the nature of their work, warrant further exploration.
Since the mid-1980s, there has been a notable rise in the influx of migrant women to the UAE, particularly in sectors such as domestic work and personal services, which historically were predominantly male-dominated.
According to the International Labor Organization (ILO), data on foreign domestic workers are often plagued by inaccuracies and limited access to transparent information.
However, it can be asserted that there was a dramatic feminization of the labor force in the 1980s, and think that the number of foreign domestic workers should be higher or at least equal to the number of residents.
Domestic workers from countries such as the Philippines, Indonesia, India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, and Ethiopia are employed across homes in the UAE, spanning cities and even remote desert regions.
Foreign domestic workers face a distinct set of circumstances compared to other migrant workers, characterized by their isolation—both physical and psychological—as an integral aspect of their migration to the UAE.
Moreover, domestic workers in the UAE are explicitly excluded from protection under the UAE Labor Law. This exclusion, combined with the stringent sponsorship system and societal norms regarding foreign workers, effectively “binds them to their employers until the end of their contract,” leaving them exceptionally susceptible to human rights abuses.
In this context, while migrant domestic workers endure the common abuses of the kafala system as mentioned earlier, it is crucial to highlight the physical, psychological, and sexual abuses documented by Human Rights Watch in its country report (2014). These include instances of physical violence such as beating, punching, slapping, kicking, choking, spitting, and pulling; as well as sexual assault or harassment, along with verbal abuse like yelling, insults, threats, and humiliation.
