"The Deadly Gulf Dream", 27 Mar 2022

An initiative called Vital Signs is researching the deaths of migrant workers from five Asian countries — Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, Nepal and the Philippines — working in the six Gulf states of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Eos presents some excerpts from its initial report, which examines key trends related to the deaths of migrant workers in the Gulf, and makes targeted recommendations to governments and other stakeholders

Low-paid migrant workers are generally over-represented in the most dangerous sectors of the global economy and this is very clearly the case in the Gulf, where they occupy virtually all of the positions in labour intensive sectors such as construction, which have historically been badly regulated.

A 2009 paper by medical researchers in the UAE states that “the rapid development of projects employing large numbers of expatriates has often outstripped the ability of education, health and labour ministries to train and deploy adequate numbers of industrial hygienists and safety inspectors to protect workers’ health and safety.”

...rights groups, trade unions, academics and the media have extensively documented the serious abuses to which these workers are routinely subjected, and identified the laws and policies and practices responsible...

Low-paid migrant workers in the Gulf are subject to a combination of risks to their physical and mental health. These risks originate from the workplace, their living conditions (encompassing their accommodation and their broader neighbourhoods), and the environment...

Heat and humidity is one of the risks that can be most easily measured and where protection is most obviously lacking…

These risks are compounded by abusive working conditions, which often include excessive working hours…

…The pandemic also exposed systemic problems with migrant workers’ access to healthcare…

The data that is available on the deaths of migrant workers in the Gulf is incomplete and contradictory in places. It precludes effective analysis of the extent and gravity of the problem...

The lack of investigations into migrant worker deaths means that there is also rarely any effort to determine if a fatality was related to occupational accidents or diseases...