NYU Promised Reforms in Abu Dhabi. Report Says It Has Reneged.

NEW YORK — When investigators reported in 2015 that 10,000 migrant construction workers employed at New York University’s campus in Abu Dhabi had not been paid money they were owed, and were subject to substandard working conditions, the university vowed to reimburse the workers and provide regular updates on its compliance with labor standards.

Three years later, thousands of workers may still be owed millions of dollars. And until this week, the university had not released a compliance report.

Or so contends a report being released Thursday by the Coalition for Fair Labor, a group of NYU faculty members and students that has long been critical of the Abu Dhabi project and its labor practices.

“We think that an institution that aims to be a Global Network University should be able to support a 21st century global architecture of compliance,” states the report, which was written primarily by Sahiba Gill, an NYU law student who is graduating next week.

But NYU strongly challenged the report, saying that it was “neither right nor fair” and that its title — “Forced Labor at NYU Abu Dhabi” — was “both incorrect and inflammatory. More broadly, we disagree with the report’s findings, which are not based on primary evidence.”

The 129-page report resurrects a highly contentious chapter in the recent history of NYU and its ambitious agenda for academic globalization, featuring degree-granting campuses in Abu Dhabi and Shanghai, and 11 academic centers on five continents.

In 2014, The New York Times published an investigation into the plight of construction workers at the Abu Dhabi campus, documenting how many had been charged steep recruitment fees to get their jobs, how few were being paid what they had been promised, and how some lived in miserable conditions, all in contravention of standards NYU had set for the project. Those standards had been established because of concerns over the region’s reputation for mistreatment of its imported workforce, with many coming from the Indian subcontinent and the Philippines.

The university, together with an Abu Dhabi government agency, then commissioned an international investigative firm, Nardello & Co., to review allegations of labor and compliance issues. After the firm found that about one-third of migrant construction workers had been excluded from the protections of NYU’s labor guidelines, the university took “full responsibility” for shortchanging some workers, and promised to repay them.

In its new report, the labor coalition found that NYU had so far paid 6,600 of the 10,000 workers subject to wage theft, but had not been able to locate the others. Still, the coalition contended that NYU had not done enough to reimburse workers for the recruitment fees they had to pay initially, even though multinational companies like Apple, and the general contractors preparing for the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar, have paid workers millions of dollars for “comparable recruitment costs and fees.”

The report also said that the university had dragged its feet in releasing an annual compliance report.

“My sense is that as public pressure moved away, this issue was put on the back burner,” said Paula Chakravartty, an associate professor at NYU in culture and communication, who reviewed the “Forced Labor” report before publication.

When asked about the coalition’s findings, NYU immediately released its long-awaited compliance report, which it said had been scheduled for release in June.

That report, prepared by Impactt Ltd., an ethical-trade consultancy based in London, was based on interviews with more than 500 workers in Abu Dhabi. And overall, the Impactt report found “a good level of compliance among contractors and a high level of satisfaction among workers.” Workers were most satisfied with their schedules and least satisfied with their pay.

NYU has sought over the past two years to reimburse workers who had been hired within the previous 12 months for fees related to their recruitment, and had so far made payments to 50 of them, though the university did not say how much each worker got, or how much has been paid in total.

In a statement, NYU said it was confident that the compliance monitoring system was robust in Abu Dhabi. The university also criticized the coalition for trying to get ahead of the compliance report, “given they were aware that Impactt’s report was forthcoming.”