Large Gulf construction firms illegally withheld wages from thousands of South Asian workers

Evidence

I was conducting fieldwork in Lahore in late May 2001 when some 1,000 Indian and Pakistani workers took to the streets of Dubai to demand payment of back wages. These workers (all of whom were men), and their relatives back home in Pakistan and India who relied on their remittances, had not seen any wages for four months. The Bartawi Group, a large construction company in the United Arab Emirates that employed more than 5,000 South Asian contract workers, illegally withheld payment of their wages, claiming cash-flow problems. For three days, laborers halted work at the construction site demanding either that their delinquent wages be immediately paid or they be given transportation to their respective embassies to complain. Management refused to negotiate for several days, and on May 22, the workers decided to mount a public demonstration as they walked to the Ministry of Labor to lodge a formal complaint. — Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims, 708

Categorization

• SEED: Essay angle: the ‘kafala’ wage-theft incident as microcosm of how contract labor regimes externalize enforcement onto the migrant’s home-country networks.
• STORYSTEM: Narrative spark: the walk to the Ministry of Labor as a three-day collective action by workers whose families depend on withheld remittances.