Bangladeshi workers stranded in UAE

More than 100 labourers from Bangladesh, India and Nepal have been stranded in their camps for about six months without pay and are living on charity of respective social and cultural groups, UAE’s The National newspaper reported.
The camps are on the outskirts of Mohammed bin Zayed City. Groups such as the Kerala Social Centre and Shakti Theatre have been caring for the workers but officials from the Indian Embassy intervened recently when the task of feeding the labourers every day became difficult for the organisations.
A lawyer has also been enlisted to help the men – whose passports are in the possession of their employer – make claims at the Labour Court in Abu Dhabi, so they can retain their legal status in the UAE.
“We want to get out of this quagmire but we cannot,” said Yamna Singh Yadav, 54, a foreman, from Uttar Pradesh in India.
“Visas have expired as well as permits. We are in limbo. All we ask the court is that those who want to work here get clearances, and those who want to return home get a safe passage.”
The men have been without access to hospital care. As the summer months have grown hotter, they have had only intermittent electricity and water supply. Salaries have not been paid since January, according to the workers and embassy officials.
The men began noticing that some of the company’s projects had stalled in September last year, about the time that their pay became erratic, before it stopped completely.
“We kept hearing of assurances that work will start tomorrow, then the next day,” said Ram Niwas, who worked as an office assistant at the company’s headquarters in Abu Dhabi. “Then work stopped altogether.”
Some of the men are afraid to leave the compound of their living quarters out of fear of being arrested for not having valid documents.
Most of the workers said their children had been forced to leave school at home because their fees had not been paid. The marriage of one worker’s sister was postponed several times before it was cancelled, because he was unable to send money for the wedding, the report said.
Ellan Govan, the community welfare officer at the foreign embassy, visited the site at the end of last month after he was approached by several Indian organisations that had been helping the men.
“They were left to fend for themselves. They had no idea what was happening,” said an embassy official. “They have no employer, no sponsor. They are just languishing in the camp.”
The embassy has supplied food that will last for the next 20 days. It is monitoring the court case between the workers and the company, which it hopes will be resolved in the next two months.
Some of the sick men were taken to a free medical camp run by the Ahalia Hospital Group in Musaffah.
Last month, more than 100 workers for a Sharjah construction company filed complaints in Dubai labour court, saying they had not been paid. One worker said water had to be brought into their camp from a mosque.
There was a dramatic increase in the number of cases filed in Dubai labour court in the first half of this year, now 2,658 compared with 940 in the first half of 2008.
Lawyers said they had seen a massive rise in cases as companies made huge swathes of their workforces redundant.

Courtesy of The New Nation