In the course of building a spiffy new campus in the United Arab Emirates, one lesson New York University taught, it seems, is how to exploit construction workers. In 2009 NYU issued a “statement of labor values” supposedly to guarantee fair treatment of workers, but project conditions, it seems, did not represent that ideal.

Although strikes are illegal in the UAE, where laborers recruited mostly from Asia are often indistinguishable from indentured servants, that’s exactly what happened last autumn.

A painter said he was promised a base pay of 1,500 dirham a month, or $408. Once on the job, his compensation turned out to be less than half that. Overtime raised it to 1,000 dirham, or $272, but food cost more than one-third of that.

The striking workers had to pay recruitment fees of as much as a year’s wages to get jobs, and weren’t reimbursed, despite NYU’s stated labor values that contractors are supposed to pay back all such fees. Most of the men said they worked 11 or 12 hours a day six or seven days a week just to earn close to what they had been promised, despite the NYU labor statement that overtime should be voluntary.

Some of the strikers, interviewed in their home countries, said they did not receive the right to redress labor disputes without “harassment, intimidation or retaliation.” This, of course, in one of the world’s wealthiest nations working with America’s largest private university.

NYU said the campus will uphold the university’s core values, from the treatment of workers to the protection of scholarly inquiry. Is forcing millions of immigrant workers to be tethered to the companies that sponsor their visas a core value?

University officials said they could not vouch for the treatment of individual construction workers because they’re not employed by the university, but by companies that work as contractors or subcontractors for the government agency overseeing the project.

We believe that wherever people work on your behalf, directly or indirectly, you have an obligation to protect their rights.

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