Prompted by international scrutiny of working conditions on flagship projects in Qatar and the UAE, in 2016, the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre surveyed construction companies on their approach to safeguarding migrant workers’ rights in both countries.
Two years on and with a second survey, the findings show that while a consistent but small group of construction companies demonstrate real commitment to tackling the risks to migrant workers in their operations, the overwhelming majority operate with high risks to human rights and continued disregard for workers’ welfare. In both years, more than 70% of surveyed companies did not respond and over 60% did not have a public commitment to human rights.
This briefing analyses the survey responses and public human rights commitments of construction companies with current projects in the region and makes recommendations to companies, clients and governments to advance the rights of migrant workers.
An overview of the risks to migrant workers on construction projects across the Gulf. Migrant workers make up between 60% and 90% of the workforce in the six countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). Low-wage construction workers are at...
Business & Human Rights Resource Centre has quizzed 100 construction companies operating in Qatar and the UAE on the measures they are taking to stop exploitation of migrant workers. Only 22 responded, indicating a shocking level of inaction. Despite increasing...
This report gives an insight into the link between corporate practices in the Arabian Gulf’s engineering and construction sector and the recruitment – in South Asian countries like India and Bangladesh – of many of the migrant workers who staff the industry’s projects.
Complex systems and realist evaluation offer promising approaches for evaluating social interventions. These approaches take into account the complex interplay among factors to produce outcomes, instead of attempting to isolate single causes of obse...Read More
To support the further knowledge and understanding of the relationship between palm oil industry stakeholders (the “Industry”) and the communities that supply workers and the potential risks that may arise to these stakeholders and also those wi...Read More
This document calls on businesses to prohibit worker document retention and gives best practice guidance.
This guidance is for company staff who want to understand what “doing business with respect for human rights” means. It is for anyone who faces – or could face – scenarios in which their function, department or company could be connected to ...Read More
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