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Article

16 Sep 2014

Author:
David Batty, Guardian (UK)

ITUC calls on ILO to investigate welfare of migrant workers in UAE

The International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) has called on the United Nations to investigate evidence that thousands of migrant workers in the United Arab Emirates, including those building a new Louvre museum and the world's largest Guggenheim, are treated as slave labour. The confederation has called on the UN's International Labour Organisation (ILO) to investigate the welfare of workers on a $27bn (£16.6bn) complex of museums and luxury resorts in Abu Dhabi, and the conditions faced by other migrants employed in construction and domestic work across the UAE, because with "alarming frequency [they] are trapped in exploitative practices that may amount to forced labour". It is understood the formal complaint warns that the Gulf state, which is a member of the ILO, "is in serious breach of its legal obligations" under the convention concerning forced labour, which it ratified more than 30 years ago...Sharan Burrow, general secretary of the confederation, said migrant workers' conditions in the UAE and the rest of the Gulf were an "international scandal".