Gulf Daily News – 3 August 2006
By KANWAL TARIQ HAMEED
PEOPLE should boycott rogue companies and employers to force them into ensuring better working and living conditions for migrant workers, a human rights activist said yesterday.
Exploitative businesses give workers extremely lacking facilities and very basic wages because they want to rake in high profits, now dissolved Bahrain Centre for Human Rights (BCHR) vice-president Nabeel Rajab says.
Ordinary people can force companies to improve their employment practices by hitting them where it hurts – by boycotting or refusing to hire services from them.
Gulf Daily News – 3 August 2006
By KANWAL TARIQ HAMEED
PEOPLE should boycott rogue companies and employers to force them into ensuring better working and living conditions for migrant workers, a human rights activist said yesterday.
Exploitative businesses give workers extremely lacking facilities and very basic wages because they want to rake in high profits, now dissolved Bahrain Centre for Human Rights (BCHR) vice-president Nabeel Rajab says.
Ordinary people can force companies to improve their employment practices by hitting them where it hurts – by boycotting or refusing to hire services from them.
Foreign embassies also need to stop thinking about their citizens only in terms of the money they are sending back home and focus more on their well-being and safety, he added.
Bahrain authorities must be more vigilant in ensuring that companies are operating with high standards of health and safety, and holding abusive employers accountable for their action, said Mr Rajab.
“I was angry and gravely concerned with the news of the death of 16 Indian workers following a fire in a three storey building in Gudaibiya which is said to have accommodated more than 200 workers,” said Mr Rajab.
“The living conditions in the labour camps that many migrant workers have to live in violate international living and working standards that deem safety and security a necessity in the working environment.
“This is a violation which everybody shares responsibility for – we as people in the country, those who put down the laws and those who run businesses.
“We have to create this culture among our people – human rights cannot be divided, migrant workers rights are also human rights.
“These are poor people, and nobody talks on their behalf – and we as Bahrainis should be talking on their behalf.
“The Bahraini community needs to play a more active role in prohibiting companies from abusing underpaid migrant workers’ human rights.
“Bahrainis should take a stance against all companies and institutions that refuse to maintain a reasonable standard of security and safety for employees by boycotting them and by openly condemning them.
“Unfortunately Asian embassies also look at their economic interests and money going from these people to their countries rather than the violations that they suffer.
“I call upon the embassies of Asian migrant workers to play a more effective and positive role in protecting their own citizens who come to Bahrain.
“They should make sure that workers are placed in suitable working and living environments and ask the Bahraini authorities firmly to take the matter of penalising offenders seriously.
“Even if we are looking at the whole thing from a financial aspect, they have to maintain the workforce by looking after their rights and providing decent working and living conditions.”
Regulations and their enforcement need to be taken more seriously by the Bahrain government, he added.
“It falls upon the Labour Ministry and the Bahrain authorities to regulate and monitor companies.
“They should not rely solely on warning companies without follow-up and without penalising offenders who place so little value upon the lives of their under paid migrant labourers.
“Although the Cabinet has ordered an enquiry into the accident, we feel that this is insufficient.
“There is an urgent need to improve living and working conditions as well as to ensure the safety of hundreds of thousands of poor migrant workers in Bahrain, as there seems to be a recurring pattern of fatal accidents amongst the lower paid.
“The ministry must take upon itself the responsibility of ensuring that health and safety standards are met by all companies operating in Bahrain – and a crackdown on offenders is necessary and to hold accountable those responsible for the accident.”