NYUAD Interview with Professor Andrew Ross

Bhargav Tata: The New York University Abu Dhabi campus recently celebrated its 10th year anniversary. According to NYU, this anniversary marks 10 years of “community,” “growth,” “memories,” and “innovation.” However, many see this anniversary to be marking the 10th anniversary of NYU using forced labor, coercion, abuse, surveillance, etx. to build the NYUAD campus. After widespread criticism of the abuse and coercion, NYU and the UAE government seemingly rectified these injustices, although many examiners of the situation believe there is still much more to be done. So to discuss this, I have the pleasure of speaking with Professor Andrew Ross, Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University, a founder of the Gulf Labor Coalition, and a founding member of the Coalition for Fair Labor. I’ll be talking with him about the New York University Abu Dhabi campus, more specifically the labor abuses and human rights violations that workers, predominantly migrant workers, had to face while working at the campus. Thank you so much for sitting down to speak with me about NYUAD.

Andrew Ross: It’s a pleasure.

BT: So I’m just gonna start off with a question concerning the basics of this issue. The Coalition for Fair Labor, which you are a member of, has termed the treatment of workers at NYUAD to be forced labor. NYU has challenged this characterization to be “both incorrect and inflammatory.” What led CFL members to conclude that the conditions of workers at NYUAD constituted forced labor?

AR: Well you’re referring to the most recent report of the Coalition, which I guess was maybe three years ago or four years ago I think. Maybe it makes sense to really go back to the beginning of the story because that report referred to conditions that were after a lot of other conversations and campaigns. Even before the announcement that NYU Abu Dhabi was gonna go ahead, some of us were aware of the labor conditions in the Gulf states and Human Rights Watch had issued at least one report, maybe two reports. I think the first report had been published, so it was out there. And there was a certain amount of general and also specialist knowledge that migrant workers face with kafala system, this sort of migrant worker sponsorship system that is pretty much adopted and implemented and used by all the Gulf states, so when we got wind of this idea that NYU was gonna build there and it was a completely executive decision on the part of the president at the time, there was no consultation with faculty. If you had actually asked faculty whether it would be a good idea to build a campus in Abu Dhabi with NYU’s name on it, I think it would be pretty clear that there would be very few people who would say that was a good idea. That wasn’t the only reason the faculty were not consulted. There’s a culture of non-consultation with faculty here in general and not just at NYU. There were some faculty members in the Senate that were informed, but they had a gag order imposed on them. They weren’t supposed to talk about it until it had been announced. We got wind of it anyway. Sarah Leah Whitson, who was the Human Rights Watch Middle Eastern director at the time, I had gotten together with her in my capacity as  president of the AUP chapter and we discussed what we thought we could do because HRW is in the position of applying pressure from the outside and they were quite frankly looking for some inside leverage. And the universities you can do that, they’re not four-walled institutions. There are constituencies of conscience, internal constituencies of conscience: faculty and students and alums and so on and so forth which make it a little different than a corporation and museum. So that’s when we kinda got the idea to start out the Coalition for Fair Labor, which was a faculty-student coalition and we began to send communications to the president’s office and circulate warnings about this basically because we really didn’t think NYU should be building classrooms on the back of abused workers. We didn’t think that faculty and students should be asked to teach and study in those classrooms. But having said that, in the first one or two years after the announcement was made, the prevailing concern on the campus was about academic freedom for obvious reasons. We’re talking about an illiberal society where the concept of speech permission and free speech and so on and so forth, the first amendment rights in this country is not taken for granted, in fact doesn’t exist.  So the prospect for academic freedom in any substantive way being part of the NYU Abu Dhabi culture seemed pretty thin, actually quite remote for a lot of folks, faculty and students alike. And then, there were particular interests, LGBTQ interest groups on campus. They just didn’t see how it was gonna work because of the laws that pertained to homosexuality in the Emirates. So that was a prevailing concern, and we didn’t disagree with that, and the AAUP is the American Association of University Professors, which is a watchdog for academic freedom nationally, so we were obliged to speak up about that, which we did. But we saw an opportunity to bundle in the labor rights issue with the academic freedom issue, arguing that the freedoms of academics, faculty, and students were very important, but it was a lesser form of freedom if it coexisted with a flagrant lack of rights on the side of the workers. So that’s how we conjoined these two issues initially, and we drew on the research done by Human Rights Watch and others, which wasn’t exactly research done on the ground in any extensive way (I mean not in a scholarly way). There are few such studies. We conducted some through the Gulf Labor Coalition–I can get to that. That was only for a short period of time, so early on, the idea of forced labor, we didn’t actually use that term. We’re very careful about the terms that we used. But I would say from the outside we knew workers being recruited on the basis of promises that were not kept. That’s fairly widely known, and one of the definitions of forced labor is technically precisely that: You’re hired to do one thing, and then you find yourself in a situation thousands of miles away with no alternative but to do another kind of work under different conditions, and that’s very typical of the migrant worker experience in the kafala system. A lot of the recruitment is done on the basis of, not entirely false promises, but very attractive ones, as any kind of recruitment does to play up the more attractive side of the outcome and the rewards and so on and so forth. And then when you find yourself in this country of employment, it’s quite a different situation. That’s one of the technical definitions of forced labor, but we can talk about others as time goes on. But that was a kind of origins of the campaign here at NYU at least.

BT: So you kind of touched on this sort of earlier on in your answer where you were talking about how NYU basically knew about the forced labor risk, and you also mentioned how Human Rights Watch reached out to them about this yet they basically decided to do nothing at all about the risk at all and not address it? What are the driving motivations behind the complete and utter negligence of the NYU administration when it comes to dealing with this issue in terms of not even trying to address the basic concerns that outside groups had and also faculty within NYU.

AR: Well, that’s a good question, and it’s a very fundamental one. A lot of it has to do with the culture of the executive class that runs universities. You know, they have a unilateral kind of mentality, especially the big universities, and the particular presidency of John Sexton was one that was often characterized as an imperial presidency. He was determined to expand and grow globally and become the first global university in all but name. And so the opportunity really to do the Abu Dhabi campus was key to that. Plus, it was of course being bankrolled. There was a huge financial incentive there. It was being bankrolled entirely by Abu Dhabi authorities. Everything would be paid for, we were assured. Nothing would be coming out of NYU’s general budget, and in addition, there was a kickback. Fairly generous sums of money would be coming our way, and for several years, that was indeed the case. Faculty who went to teach in Abu Dhabi, the departments would get rewarded with additional sums of money, and in some cases, that amounted to a huge slush fund. Some departments would be sitting on a million dollars or more of disposable income. Other departments got nothing because they didn’t participate. The money that was sloshing over from Abu Dhabi had a very corrupting influence here on the square, which was one unforeseen consequence. But in general, just getting back to your question, there was that unilateral mentality, which meant that they don’t really consult with regional experts. No one in the Middle Eastern Studies Department here for example was consulted. Administrations don’t really use or draw upon faculty expertise when they make policy decisions like that. And then there was Sexton’s own visionary mentality. All he could see was this glittering prize in the desert on this island, which would be part of NYU’s empire, and I think that had a lot to do with it quite frankly. The labor stuff is not a high priority anyway, never has been at NYU, and it would be seen as a not so much the responsibility of this institution but more the responsibility of the host, the delivering authority in Abu Dhabi, which it is for the most part. They delivered the campus. Tamkeen delivered the campus. And so it was really on them. The reason we decided to do the inside strategy was because we saw an opportunity to raise regional labor standards, to use NYU’s presence to raise [them]. We knew we couldn’t stop the building of the campus, but we saw an opportunity to leverage the brand, so we pushed from the very beginning for codes of conduct or principles of recruitment, debt recruitment, a whole laundry list of items that in the aggregate would go a long way towards remedying some of the abuses for workers who were engaged in the project and we actually after a while we did actually produce some outcomes. NYU’s principles— I think they’re still up on the website unless they wiped them off. THe labor principles are really good on paper and they were far in advance of anything in the Gulf at the time. So that was the plan basically to do that, to try and do that. NYU having then established a template for higher labor standards. Other entities that had vulnerable brands would follow suit. At least that was the driving principle.

BT:  There was reporting that a significant chunk of workers at NYUAD–I think you kind of hinted at it– were excluded from being covered by those labor standards set out by NYU. How did this happen–them [the workers] being completely excluded? What sort of justification did the university use and what did this exclusion mean for these workers?

AR: Good question. It’s an important part of the story, although it’s not the whole part of the story. It’s part of the story that the medi fixated on, but just to backtrack a little bit, after the lkabor principles were drawn up and out there, we knew at the same time that these things look very well on paper. I have a copy of China’s labor laws here in my office. They look great. In some respects, they’re better than the U.S. labor laws. They’re just not implemented. And they’re worthless unless they’re implemented quite frankly. They’re worse than worthless because they give the appearance of a corrective situation without the reality. There are two ways of making sure they are implemented. One is you have a worker organization that makes sure that can’t happen in the Gulf because unions are illegal. It’s very difficult for workers to organize. The Plan B is to have a monitor that is a reputable, third-party or independent monitor that doesn’t have a conflict of interest in the region. And we pushed very hard, the coalition pushed very hard for NYU to retain the services of a monitor like that. There are several of them out there. And in fact, NYU belongs to the Workers Rights Consortium, which was set up during the anti-sweatshop campaigns. The Workers Rights Consortium, when we consulted with them whether they would actually want to do the monitoring and if they didn’t, whether they could help. And they were on board with it. NYU is actaully a member of that national organization. Those proposals were denied. They weren’t ignored, but they were denied. Instead, NYU chose a monitor who had had a very deep conflict of interest, had other contracts with Abu Dhabi autorities. You would not have expected that monitor to do a good job. And so, that’s what happened, the monitor fell down on the job, did a terrible job, and in the end, this was only revealed in the public eye by a major New York Times exposé. It was the only day in the Emirates when the New York Times was banned from being published and circulated, the day they carried that article on the front page, so NYU is very responsive to New York Times coverage, sometimes exclusively so. So they obviously had to do something. And they comissioned, when I say they, I mean the Abu Dhabi authorities commssioned the report, an  investigative report. And that report found that a significant number of the workers cut out of these agreements. And as far as I’m aware, from what I can recall, they were workers who belonged to firms that were small enough, in other words maybe less than a 100 workers and therefore, they had been told that they didn’t have to meet the labor standards, so there was a large percentage of the workforce that was cut out and was underpaid and so on and so forth.

BT: Are you referring to the Nardello and Co. report?

AR: Yeah, the Nardello Report. Right. Exactly.

BT: In the wake of that report, NYU and the UAE government pledged to reform and said that they would improve living and working conditions for the migrants there. Do you think they’ve met those commitments thus far? What sort of things have they not been able to completely fulfill?

AR: Well, you know there’s been a lot of international media scrutiny of the kafala system and worker abuses in the Gulf States, especially in Qatar right now because of the World Cup and the building of the stadium for the World Cup, which is gonna be staged next year. And so, every so often, one of the Gulf states announces that it’s making major reforms in the kafala system or abolishing it entirely–Bahrain did that, Qatar did that, Emirates to a lesser degree–but they’re always introducing reforms every few years so so, but there’s no real evidence that the system is substantially changed or altered and in the absence of real worker organizations, where you can verify conditions on the ground from workers themselves, there’s really no way of knowing whether anything has changed unless you take worker testimony, and we’ve been talking about NYU but an important part of the story for me at least was a couple years after the coalition was founded here, I helped to co-found the Gulf Labor Artists Coalition, and this was an international group of artists, writers, and curators that focused on the building of the Guggenheim Museum on Saadiyat island, not very far from NYU. And we did a similar kind of campaign, it was a much more creative campaign against the Guggenheim, but it had similar goals: raise the labor standards and have the Guggenheim be a model employer basically and so we employed a lot of very creative strategies, being artists and all in the course of that campaign but one of them was actually travelling there and visiting the labor camps and taking worker testimony. We learned about conditions on the ground until the government decided that they were gonna bar us from doing that kind of work so several of us were denied entry to the UAE and basically that work stopped at that point but we gathered enough information and testimony to know that nothing much was changing despite the lip service given to reforms and we also uncovered some details about industrial action on the NYU site (strikes) that were very brutally dealt with, police beatings and deportations of the workers. That stuff didn’t make its way into the Nardello report, but we gathered testimony to that effect. Now it so happens that if there truly was academic freedom in a place like NYU Abu Dhabi, then you would expect that faculty and students would be out there doing that kind of work, taking testimony from workers and publishing the results but that doesn’t happen. That’s never happened, and that really reflects the high degree of self-censorship that exists around the topic of labor abuse. There are many controversial topics that are broached and published about at NYU Abu Dhabi, but labor conditions aren’t one of them. So I have not seen one useful or adequate field study that draws in worker testimony. There is research that’s done there that draws on, really looks at the conditions in the sending conditions, in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, but not on site itself. That’s verboten or understood to be verboten. So we don’t have that worker testimony anymore. And it turned out that although we were just a bunch of artists and writers–Well I’m not, but I was with artists and writers– and that was one of the few sources of worker testimony that was actually gathered at that time.

BT: Kind of relating to the previous question, so NYU said that they would reimburse the employees with fees associated with the recruitment process but then they only ended up covering the fees of workers who paid for recruitment on the NYUAD project. Could you explain why this reinterpretation by NYU and the narrow boundary that they set for who can be compensated is problematic?

AR: It’s all about the money. And as I recall it wasn;t just recruitment fees, it was also unpaid wages or underpaid wages rather, which the Nardello report outlined. It’s true that everyone who arrives in the Gulf arrives with a big bag of debt on their backs. You can’t get there without paying a number of middle men along the way and incurring that debt, which then you have to labor for at least a year or two, sometimes three years to pay off that debt. And that’s very key to the system of forced labor. No one would work that hard under such disadvantageous conditions if they weren’t paying off a debt. That is absolutely key to the whole labor system. I should also say that we actually helped NYU and Tamkeen track down a lot of these workers because a lot of them had been deported and through the contacts that the Gulf Labor Coalition had, we were able to help track some of them down in India or Pakistan wherever they had been deported to. Because NYU didn’t have that kind of contact with workers obviously, and it was very incomplete. And quite frankly, it wasn’t our job to do that kind of tracking or help. It was very labor intensive, and it was something they should’ve been paying people to do, not activists. So I think it was very incomplete in the end, and they were able to say, “look we just couldn’t track these people down, we could only track down so many.” As for this stipulation that they had to be recruited for the NYU project, it makes very little sense whatsoever. That’s not how recruitment works. Workers are not recruited to work on a particular project. They’re recruited by manpower companies that then broker their labor to subcontractors. Subcontractors may have an agreement to work on a particular project, but that can change from month to month depending on where the labor is needed. So it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to say, “You had to be recruited, the labor recruiter had to come to you in Bangladesh and say, ‘you’re gonna come and build NYU’s new branch in Abu Dhabi.’” That’s not how it works. For obvious reasons, that was just to limit the financial damage of the payout, I think.

BT: Another thing I found really interesting is that NYU claimed that their compliance program had been successful because they said that they paid workers at a higher rate and that the housing that they provided to their workers was on average better than the housing giving to the average migrant worker in Abu Dhabi. Do you find this claim problematic or troubling in any way?

AR: You know, it’s a pretty low bar for one thing, those comparisons. I don’t see a lot of empirical evidence to back up the claim. By that same token, we only had limited access in the field trips that we took. I do remember visiting an apartment downtown. It was a total firetrap, with hundreds of workers crammed into the rooms there, and I have a lot of pictures still in my camera still from that visit. And a lot of them were painters who were employed on the NYU campus project. They certainly did not look like conditions that were even remotely adequate or reasonable, but I can’t really speak about the conditions in general. We just didn’t have access. You need to be able to verify these things, and that’s what a monitor is for. A monitor interviews workers off-site so that they can feel safe and secure. And the monitor will visit housing and is supposed to do a truly independent audit. We just have never had that, in the case of NYU Abu Dhabi. And I should say that the monitor who was commissioned to replace the previous one, they continue to find problems. Not major ones, but yeah, even PriceWaterhouseCoopers. PriceWaterhouseCoopers was commissioned as the auditor for, for all the Saadiyat Island projects. And even PriceWaterhouse, which had major conflicts of interest themselves, audit a lot of the big firms that are contracted to work in Saadiyat Island. You should never have a monitor that’s monitoring labor conditions of companies that you're doing financial audits of. That makes no sense. But even in that case, they found a lot of problems in their reports.

BT: One thing when I was reading about this issue, one thing that kept coming up was employers in Abu Dhabi, essentially controlling workers movements, especially, often by forcibly taking away their passports, and then totally giving the employers control over the workers’ immigration status. So what are the implications for workers in a situation like this?

Well, that is the crux of a lot of the forced labor template that you basically constrain the movement of workers. It's not a labor market, because they can't choose their employer. You can't move from one employer to another. And basically a kafala sponsorship system holds that you have to have an in-country sponsor, and it can be anyone. It can be an individual. It's just a citizen of the Emirates, doesn't have to be an employer. But you're basically beholden to your sponsor. And if a sponsor decides they no longer want to sponsor you, you’re liable to deportation. So that obviously limits the mobility, it means there's no labor market to speak of, and so on and so forth. These are very, very repressive conditions to work out there.

BT: Another thing that I found really troubling is that there are legal protections that the UAE government offers to workers on paper against things like wrongful termination, or unsafe working conditions or other labor abuses on paper. Why is it so difficult for workers to to seek legal recourse or ensure that these legal protections are enforced?

Well, the way that the law operates in the courts, it makes it very difficult for workers to bring those kinds of cases to the attention of the authorities. Arabic, you know, the language of choice and is the Language of Business. A lot of workers don't speak Arabic. They don't have legal representation, it's expensive. And show up in court, you have to take a day off work. Just as liable to end up behind bars is actually getting your case heard properly. It's not a legal system. that supports labor protections, that is set up to support and enact labor protections. It's quite the opposite. The legal system is set up to deter people from trying to protect themselves. So there's, you know, there's just a lot of evidence of people ending up in detention or being deported, who tried to take things into their own hands. And that is also the inevitable outcome of most strikes. You don't hear about strikes occurring, but they happen all the time. And, they're they're dealt with quite brutally.

BT: Yeah, one thing that I, my understanding of this entire situation of the labor conditions in Abu Dhabi, in in a lot of the Gulf in general, is that the labor conditions there, legal protections offered for workers, the political status is a lot of these workers, oftentimes in the media, there's like this portrayal of working conditions and the goal to be a product of their culture, something that's completely foreign to us as, people living in the West. But from reading more about this issue, I, I feel like, rather, this is an intensification of the conditions that we have here. And I think part of it is connected with the fact that like, there are Western financial interests operating in that area, and there's weaker governments the rights that they do have, don't have, like the precedents as they have here. Like the protections. That's what I got, essentially.

AR: Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, I would agree with that. There's, you know, a lot of Orientalism is projected onto a labor system like that, and, and that people should be aware of that and try and avoid reinforcing it or perpetuating it. But they're, you know, there's a lot of now scholarship and Natasha Iskander's book, for example, is a very good, she does real a deep dive and historical investigation of the origins of the Kafala system, very much and imperialist, you know, a product of British labor policy. Earlier in the 20th century, and in the pearl industry, where enslaved people from East Africa were the dominant workforce. So it has a long history, and then successive eras of outside influence and outside domination got interpreted differently. But in the post colonial period, it took on a very specific form, you know, one as you say that was oriented towards the interests of the corporations, the Western corporations that do business there. I mean, every rich country has migrant workers who are abused and exploited. You don’t have to go very far from here, my office, to find construction sites in New York City where that is the case. The difference in the Gulf states is, especially places like the Emirates. It’s a difference in kind, I think, rather a difference in degree because you're talking about 95% of the population. Not, you know, a small percentage of the population as it is here. When the migrant workers are the majority, by far the majority of the residents, it's a different kind of society. It's a totally different kind of labor economy. So on the his, on the historical grounds, and also in terms of the scale of the population. I think things are markedly different on both counts.

BT: Many of the lower lying areas within the UAE and parts of a lot of Abu Dhabi islands, I think, including Saadiyat island will be lost to rising sea levels in the upcoming decades. So how do you anticipate the climate factor to play into this issue?

AR: I mean, I read the estimates of sea level rise in the Persian Gulf and they don't look good. You know, for these coastal cities, like, you know, Doha, Dubai and Abu Dhabi. The projections show that these cities are going to have to be moved miles inland in the decades to come. And islands like Saadiyat island will certainly be much more of an island. I do recall, on one of our visits, the Gulf labor coalition visits we were, we were the guests of TDIC for one day, the Tourism Development Corporation which is the government entity that presides over Saadiyat Island. And they took us to their showroom, where they had models of the island. And, you know, we're looking at these, you know, museums where the waves are gently lapping the foot of the museums. So what are you gonna find you're gonna do and sea level rise is here? And they had no answer. They just said we'll get back to you on that. And then they themselves are migrants. All the professionals who work at that level are all migrants too. And they have no rights, they can be deported equally overnight. There is a power differential there. But ultimately, they're there at the pleasure of their sponsors. These are highly paid professionals from all over the Middle East. That, that our work on delivering projects to the state, large, large scale construction projects.

BT: Coming into the final questions, what do you think students at NYU can do to aid the workers at NYUAD in their struggle?

AR: Well, I mean, I, when people ask me that question, I always try and encourage, you know, folks to be to be doing that field work, gathering testimony from workers is completely invaluable. We can conjecture all we like from from the position of our armchairs. But it's just doesn't mean as much unless you unless you really have testimony on the ground, so that's what I tell people, if you're, if you're going to AbuDhabi, figure out a way of doing it. So that would be my answer to you.

BT: Is there any work you're doing right now, related to or unrelated to NYU AD that you'd like to share with us,

AR: After I got barred from entry there, actually, myself and some of my comrades from the Gulf Labor Coalition started working in Palestine. And we sort of continued some of our some of our research there, and I spun off a book from that research about the conditions of Palestinian construction workers in the stone industry. So it was still in the Middle East, and was not unrelated since, you know, Palestinian workers used to be the main labor force in the Gulf states, you know, before the 1990s, and they were largely replaced by South Asian migrant workers after that. But no, I don't do work in Abu Dhabi. I have opinions, but no continuing work. That said, if the Guggenheim, you know the Guggenheim Museum basically stopped construction several years ago. And we take credit for that. And every year, they insist that they're going to start up again. And we haven't seen any evidence of that. But the Gulf Labor Coalition has been in a dormant state, pending, pending the revival of that ambition to build the Guggenheim on Saadiyat Island, and if they do, then, you know, we'll talk about springing back into action.

BT: Awesome. Thanks so much for speaking with me today.

AR: It's a pleasure.