Pakistani migrant workers on a construction site in Dubai. Credit: S. Irfan Ahmed/IPS

By Irfan Ahmed
DUBAI, Sep 21 2016 (IPS)

In the Al Quoz industrial area of Dubai in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), a number of medium and large-sized buses can be spotted transporting workers clad in company uniforms to distant worksites early in the morning. In the evening or, in certain cases, late at night, these workers are brought back to labour camps in the same buses.

At the camps, the migrant workers barely have time to rest before the next workday. They huddle inside small, dingy quarters and the number of occupants may rise up to eight per room. With their belongings stuffed into every corner, they hardly have space to move and are vulnerable to catch infections from each other. Their day starts too early as they have to cook their food to carry to the site and ends late due to long journeys amid frequent traffic jams.“The role of the state becomes important here as migrant workers in the Gulf are voiceless. Without the right to associate and demand rights, they are as helpless as one can think of.” -- Khalid Mahmood of the Lahore-based Labour Education Foundation

The workers at a typical camp hail from different countries, so the common practice is to allocate shared rooms according to their nationalities. At a typical labour camp there can be a Pakistani block, Indian block, Nepali block or Bangladeshi block.

Javed Iqbal, 29, lives in one such labour camp. He has come to Dubai from Pakistan through a middleman who sold a work visa to his family for Rs 300,000 (about 3,000 dollars). The family borrowed money from relatives to complete this transaction. Having not attended school beyond grade 4, Javed cannot read and write and couldn’t find a job in his home country. The same lack of education and any proper skill set makes him ineligible for regular recruitment abroad as well.

The only option he had was to come to Dubai on whatever salary he could get and gradually build his fortune there. But things did not work out well and he is stuck in a construction sector job that pays a paltry 240 dollars per month. He says it’s hard for him to cover his personal expenses, let alone send anything back home. Meanwhile, he is under immense pressure from his family to pay back the loan that bought his visa.

A labour camp in Dubai. Workers are allocated sleeping quarters based on nationality, and the number of occupants may be as high as eight per room. Credit: S. Irfan Ahmed/IPS

Javed is not the only one in this situation. There are thousands of Pakistanis like him who are told fairytales about career growth prospects in UAE but once there, nightmares await them. These workers are mostly unskilled and employed in the construction sector, which is not performing well in the oil-rich countries of the Gulf region. With oil prices down in the global market, the government is facing difficulty clearing payments of construction companies.

“I was inspired by the story of a village fellow who went to Dubai as a mason three decades ago. Now he owns two houses and several acres of land in the village,” Muhammad Iqbal, a migrant worker from Gujranwala district, told IPS. Everybody in the village wants to emulate him regardless of the situation that exists in the Gulf region, he adds.

Dependence on remittances

Pakistan relies heavily on remittances to build on its foreign reserves and they constitute around 6.9 per cent of its Gross Domestic Product (GDP), according to a World Bank report. More than half of the remittances come from two countries – Saudi Arabia and Dubai. There are around 1.3 million Pakistani workers in the UAE and close to 4.3 million in Saudi Arabia.

In the last fiscal year, the country received remittances worth 19.9 billion dollars, but in July they dropped by 20 per cent as compared to the figure of the same month last year. There are speculations that layoffs and non-payment of salaries to migrant workers in this region are the cause of this drop in volume. Some fear there is more to come as a large number of Pakistani workers could face job losses due to the slump in the construction sector where they are mostly employed.

But Ashraf Mehmood Wathra, governor of the State Bank of Pakistan, argues it is a temporary phenomenon and things will improve as these countries are revising their economic policies to offset the impact of the crash in oil prices.

Skills matter

A major problem with Pakistani migrant labour in Gulf region is that it is not diversified and has remained confined to mostly one or two sectors. The Pakistani government has long ignored this aspect and left the shaping of international labour migration trends at the mercy of the private sector. Of late, following the layoffs of around 9,000 Pakistani workers by construction companies in Saudi Arabia, there is a realization that an overwhelming dependence on this sector will not be a safe bet in the future.

Zahid Mahmood, General Manager at Material Lab, a leading material testing company in Dubai, says Pakistani labourers are considered matchless for working in the construction sector. “They can survive in the worst possible working conditions and endure extreme heat,” he told IPS.

He said that Pashtuns from the northwestern part of the country are high in demand for this very reason. But this, he says, has a negative side as well because little has been done to capture share in other sectors. These workers may be employed for as low as 210 dollars per month, although masons, carpenters, fabricators, supervisors, welders and other skilled workers can earn more.

Zahid says there are very few Pakistanis in the services sector, which is dominated by Indians due to their skills and better educational status. There are very few Pakistani security guards or hospitality sector workers despite the existence of a heavy demand for these professions.

The country will have to devise a proper human resource development strategy to stay in the highly competitive and evolving labour market of the Gulf region, he adds. He is also worried about the low wages paid to Pakistani workers and says there should be official efforts to set a minimum benchmark, for example, 300 dollars per month.

Dilip Ratha, a World Bank economist who recently authored a Migration and Development brief, points out that the Gulf region construction boom funded by oil-based revenue is over and now there is less need for unskilled migrant labour. These economies are also trying to create space to employ their own nationals – something that will further shrink the job market for foreign nationals.

Government initiatives

Though there is a lot to be done, the government of Pakistan has announced certain initiatives that it claims will promote safe and decent employment for its migrant workers. These include production of trained, skilled and certified workforce with enhanced employability.

Irfan Qaisar, chairman of the Technical Education & Vocational Training Authority (TEVTA) of the most populous Punjab province, told IPS that they have a developed a Labour Management Information System (LMIS) that maintains the latest information about local and foreign job markets. He says the focus of this government-run institution is on producing demand-based labour and doing away with the unplanned policies of the past.

TEVTA is training people for the hospitality industry, drivers with the help of national Motorway Police and security guards. “Recently, we have announced training of 50,000 security guards on modern lines and with the support country’s law enforcing authorities,” he said. “I am quite hopeful they will be high in demand in international markets once trained on these lines.”

Way forward

Government efforts notwithstanding, there are calls for active engagement between labour-sending and receiving countries to improve the lives of migrant workers. Expecting desired results without government-to-government level negotiations is asking for too much, especially in monarchies.

Khalid Mahmood, director of the Labour Education Foundation (LEF), a Lahore-based labour rights group, put it this way: “The role of the state becomes important here as migrant workers in Gulf are voiceless. Without the right to associate and demand rights, they are as helpless as one can think of.”

After working in Thailand legally for four years, many Myanmar migrant workers are facing an uncertain future in the coming weeks as their visas expire. Tired of the lack of security, they want the Myanmar government to improve the current labour agreement with Thailand.

The death of 27-year-old Soe Moe Kyaw’s father in 2010 drove the family’s rice planting business in Mandalay into a dire economic situation. Strapped for cash, his mother borrowed 8,000 baht (266 dollars) from her sister to pay a broker in Myanmar for Soe Moe Kyaw to travel across the border into Thailand.

Nearly 80 percent of the estimated three million migrant workers in Thailand are from Myanmar. Credit: Daniel Julie/CC BY 2.0

Several months after his arrival, he found employment canning fish for 300 baht (10 dollars) per day at tuna canning factory Unicord in Mahachai. As the eldest of three siblings, Soe Moe Kyaw had dreams of earning enough money in Thailand to improve his family’s way of life.

“In the beginning, I thought that I could earn enough money to invest in a rice trade business in Myanmar, but the first few months of my salary went towards repaying my aunt. Even though I work eight hours per day and sometimes overtime, I only make enough to pay my sister’s education costs,” Soe Moe Kyaw told IPS.

“Since I entered the country illegally, I didn’t have proper documents, so I often had to hide in a room for fear of being arrested by the Thai police. As migrants, we face a lot of uncertainties because our jobs aren’t guaranteed, and even after paying a lot of money to become legal, we’re always threatened with losing our visas.”

Nearly 80 percent of the estimated three million migrant workers in Thailand are from Myanmar.

In a bid to curb undocumented migration, the governments of Myanmar and Thailand signed a memorandum of understanding in 2003 granting migrant workers the ability to apply for two-year work visas, with the possibility of a one time two-year extension.

Under the agreement, after a maximum of four years, workers are required to return to Myanmar for a period of at least three years before being eligible for re-entry.

In the coming weeks, hundreds of thousands of migrants – who underwent the process in July 2009 – will have to choose between leaving or remaining in the country illegally.

Economically, Myanmar is in no condition to absorb a return of so many workers from Thailand.

Last year, Myanmar migrant workers remitted an estimated 566 million dollars. A dent in this will hit families hard. Myanmar has a 37 percent unemployment rate, and more than 26 percent of the country’s population of 60 million lives below the poverty line.

Thirty-two year old Ma Cho is from the city of Myeik in Myanmar’s Tanintharyi Region. In 2003, she paid a broker 3500 baht (110 dollars) to cross the border into Thailand. She peels shrimp at 10 to 15 dollars per day.

Ma Cho’s family relies heavily on the money she sends.

“After paying for my living expenses here in Thailand I’m able to send around 200,000 kyat or 7,000baht (233 dollars) every two or three months. This keeps food on the table, pays for my daughter’s education and contributes to the new house my family is building for my daughter and I once I return,” Ma Cho told IPS.

“I would like to say to the Myanmar government that more then three million workers contribute to the country’s economy. The current labour policy with Thailand needs to ensure our rights and protection from exploitation.”

“Many workers would prefer to return to Myanmar because we miss being with our families, but life is very hard there,” 33-year-old Sue Soe Nwe told IPS. “I was working as a volunteer teacher in my village of Dawei but the salary of 700 kyat (one dollar) per month wasn’t enough to buy one shoe. We have no electricity or water system in my area and if we don’t have any money then we can’t go to school.

“If I could speak to the Myanmar government I would say that there should be no class discrimination based on whether an individual has a high-level or low-level education. Only those at the top are feeling the democratic changes but for everyday people nothing has changed.”

Better jobs need to be created in Myanmar, she said. “The government should clearly define the minimum wage and provide more security for working families. Currently the minimum wage is 1500 kyat (1.50 dollar) per day and this needs to greatly increase to a more fair standard so that people can really live and survive in our own country.”

Traditionally the bulk of migrant labourers in Russia’s Far East have come from China, with a few North Koreans mixed in. But of late, workers from Central Asia have been pushing their Chinese competitors off the lowest rung on the labour ladder in eastern Siberia.

Chinese citizens still comprise a sizeable majority of the foreign workforce in the Amur Region, as well as other areas of the Russian Federation that border China. But in just the past few years, the migrant worker ratio of Chinese to Central Asians in the Amur Region has gone from four-to-one down to just over two-to-one, according to official statistics.

Employers in the Amur regional capital Blagoveshchensk, a city of 220,000, say rising wage expectations of Chinese workers make it more cost-effective for them to employ migrants from formerly Soviet republics like Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. China’s rapidly rising prosperity at home is putting pressure on Chinese migrants to earn more and send more home to relatives.

At the same time, traditional migrant labour markets for Central Asians in Western Russia, especially Moscow and St. Petersburg, are becoming glutted, prompting an increasing number to explore opportunities in the Far East.

“For sure it’s the best option to make money in Moscow. But it’s too hard to find a place there these days. There are too many of us Uzbeks over there already,” said Batyr, a migrant from Uzbekistan who has worked for the past six months in Blagoveshchensk laying asphalt.

It’s not uncommon to encounter lots of Central Asians in the city these days, mainly in the construction sector. In other Far Eastern cities, including Vladivostok and Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, Central Asians have found work driving public buses.

Regional officials aren’t unhappy to see Central Asians replacing Chinese migrants, especially in the agricultural sector. Local authorities explain that Chinese farm workers on numerous occasions have disregarded local regulations.

Tatyana Yakimenko, the head of the External Labour Migration Regulation Department of the Amur Regional Government, noted several instances in which the improper use of fertiliser caused soil degradation on farmland.

Aside from lower wage expectations, Central Asians have a competitive advantage because they don’t need visas to travel to Russia. Chinese workers, on the other hand, must cope with a visa regime that hampers many would-be migrants from crossing the border. For those wishing to work officially, the approval process takes months.

The demand for undocumented workers in the Amur Region is significant, official statistics suggest. The local office of the Federal Migration Service issued a quota in 2013 for 13,000 migrant workers, a number that is about 1.5 percent of the overall regional population.

At the same time, regional officials estimate there is demand for about 37,000 migrant labourers. The labour gap is the largest in the agricultural sector: one estimate for 2014 projects that for every four farm jobs that will be open, only about one officially registered migrant worker will be available.

Given the regional imbalance of supply and demand, Central Asian undocumented migrants appear to be finding life a little easier in the Far East than their counterparts in big cities in European Russia, where harassment and extortion on the part of local officials and law enforcement officers are the norm.

To help blend in, Batyr, the migrant worker from Uzbekistan, says he’s adopted a Russian name – Dmitry. Batyr’s mannerisms and physical traits are such that locals don’t immediately take him to be from Central Asia as he moves about the city when not on the job. As long as he keeps his mouth shut, he tends not to get hassled. When forced to speak, though, his halting Russian reveals him to be a foreigner.

The influx of Central Asian migrants is reaching the point where local officials’ comparative tolerance may start to dissipate. In the Kamchatka Region, for example, officials are already showing signs of wanting to impose stricter regulations.

A Public Chamber meeting in the region is scheduled for September in which one of the items on the agenda has to do with overcrowding in kindergartens, local media outlets report.

Locals say that that the children of citizens should be guaranteed slots in public kindergartens before the kids of migrant labourer families are offered seats. Others complain that pregnant Central Asian women are traveling to the Far East to give birth in public hospitals, placing a burden on health services that are already stretched thin.

Editor’s note:  Evgeny Kuzmin is a freelance journalist. He worked as an editorial associate for EurasiaNet.org in 2012.

The first workers strike in 26 years in this affluent Southeast Asian city-state has triggered some soul-searching about the treatment of migrant labour and the low wages they are paid.

There are some 1.3 million foreign workers in a population of four million people in this small island state, which was recently ranked as the world’s richest country, with a per capita income of 56,532 dollars a year, by the World Wealth Report 2012 by Knight Frank and Citi Private Bank.

But most of the foreign workers – in fact some 931,000 of them according to figures as of June 2012 – are low-paid unskilled labour from neighbouring Asian countries, who earn nowhere near that figure.

The 171 bus drivers from China who went on strike by taking medical leave at the same time on Nov. 26 and Nov. 27 were earning about 980 dollars a month. They were complaining about receiving lower pay than Malaysian and Singaporean drivers, inadequate rest days and poor dormitory accommodation.

The government, well known for its pro-business policies and tough attitudes towards labour protests, acted swiftly by charging five of the drivers for breaking local “no-strike” laws and cancelling the work permits of and deporting 29 of the drivers who went on strike.

Since then, one of them has been sentenced to six weeks in jail, while four others are out on bail and appeared in court Wednesday for a pre-trial conference.

“We cannot let these Chinese workers take the rap for asking only for fair employment. And we cannot agree to their punishment when all the processes that exist in our name denied them the basic right to have their grievances heard,” wrote Vincent Wijeysinghe, an opposition Singapore Democratic Party member and a labour rights activist, in a blog posting which went viral here.

Acting Manpower Minister Tan Chuan Jin said in the immediate aftermath of the strike that “by taking matters into their own hands, the drivers have clearly crossed the line.”

He declared the strike illegal, because public transport is an essential service where an employer needs to give 14 days’ notice of the intent to go on strike. Under this argument, the strikers’ ring leaders were arrested and charged for breaking Singaporean laws.

Economics lecturer Walter Edgar Theseira of Nanyang Technological University argued in an interview with Yahoo Singapore that the strike and its aftermath had demonstrated “potentially serious vulnerabilities” that arise from Singapore’s significant reliance on low-cost foreign labour.

He also added that rather than provide high enough salaries to lure Singaporean workers to unskilled jobs, they offer just enough wages to attract people from countries like China, Myanmar, Bangladesh and the Philippines, thus creating labour conditions almost similar to the conditions in those countries.

John Gee, president of the migrant workers rights group Transient Workers Count Too, told IPS in an interview that the dispute between the Chinese migrant bus drivers and the partly government-owned SMRT bus company has been going on for at least six months. “Though workers may have broken the law, it needs to be taken into account that they may have been provoked,” he added.

Two main issues have come to the limelight as a result of the strike. One is the different wages paid to workers from different countries who do the same type of work, and the other is the hefty job placement fees that agents charge the workers for finding them jobs in Singapore.

A number of drivers told a Straits Times reporter that they paid more than 25,000 yuan (4,000 dollars) to Chinese agents to secure a job in Singapore.

Businesswoman Elsie Kwok defended the Singaporean employers’ policy of discriminating on the basis of nationality in their pay scales. “I have employed many girls from the Philippines, Indonesia, Myanmar and China as sales assistants. There are differences in their knowledge levels and attitude to the job. So it’s fair to pay some lower than the others,” she told IPS.

Gee disagrees. “Government has always said that they leave determination of salaries to market forces. Employers always argue on these grounds (to discriminate on pay scales). But it has to do with national stereotypes,” he argued.

When IPS asked the National Trades Union Congress (NTUC) about the fairness of such wage disparities, a spokeswoman said: “Migrant labour should be paid fair and reasonable wages according to the work they do which commensurate their relevant skills and experience level. A more sustainable way is to enhance the quality of foreign labour so that this can better meet both supply and demand as well as cause our businesses to remain competitive.”

Deputy Prime Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam warned this month that Singapore was facing a “permanently tight labour market” and business must look to increase productivity to boost business growth. Singapore’s jobless rate at 1.9 percent is one of the lowest in the world.

In an interview with IPS, Wijeysinghe argued that the NTUC, because of its close association with the government, “appears to advocate more for government and corporations than for workers.”

He also said that although the government had recently pushed through legislation to put a cap on the placement fees agents could charge workers, the problem could not be solved without bilateral initiatives, and the “government has systematically refused to work bilaterally, blaming the agency system in sender countries.”

Many labour rights advocates here argue that it is the hefty placement fees charged by the agency system, where agents in both sender and receiver countries are involved, that creates apathy among migrant workers when it comes to discrimination and unfair treatment.

“When workers are sent back home prematurely, we have found many cases where they return worse off than they were before (because of these fees paid to agents),” Gee said. “A regional compact which is enforceable is needed on fees and charges,” he argued, adding that migrant workers also needed to be unionised in independent unions.

“If they (Chinese bus drivers) were unionised, the union worker could go to the boss and discuss complaints without naming the worker – so he couldn’t be sent home,” he said. Under Singapore law, an employer can unilaterally cancel a work permit and send the worker home within 48 hours.