Migrant workers toil in the sweltering heat; they do not get their wages on time and they live in dismal conditions. Their labour is exploited as they work for 10 to 12 hours a day instead of the prescribed 8 hours. The workers don’t get clean water for drinking. This is happening in Dubai, Sharjah […]
Category: Pakistan
“That hell,” was a windowless, dark cell in Brooklyn that Anser Mehmood, a Pakistani truck driver, had inhabited alone for four months in 2001. Mehmood was a father to four children, at the time living in the port city of Bayonne, New Jersey on the Atlantic coastline. Guards surveilled him night and day from a […]
When shop-owner Nazir Masih left Pakistan in the late 1970s to try his luck in the oil-rich city of Abu Dhabi, he did not imagine a future of detention and deportation.
People move from one country to the other primarily for better economic opportunities. No doubt it is not an easy option to leave your family and head for a destination where you have to work like machines and go through excessive mental stress. Official figures show that a total of 5.4 million Pakistani workers went […]
Pakistan has long been a major exporter of human resource, primarily to the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries including Saudi Arabia, UAE and Qatar, and receives substantial foreign remittances sent by the expatriates every year. Opportunities opened up for Pakistani workers in the Gulf region soon after the boom in the oil sector and the […]
In the Al Quoz industrial area of Dubai in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), a number of medium and large-sized buses can be spotted transporting workers clad in company uniforms to distant worksites early in the morning. In the evening or, in certain cases, late at night, these workers are brought back to labour camps […]
Sale of work visas in black market plays havoc with the lives of migrant workers Foreign remittances sent by Pakistanis working abroad are around six per cent of the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and hint at the huge number of labour migrants who have left for foreign lands to earn their livelihood. If we […]
Thousands of Pakistani migrant workers are stranded in Saudi Arabia, and experts predict the situation will only worsen with the plummeting oil prices Shahzad Hussain, father of a young son, belongs to district Sheikhupura in Punjab. Around six months ago, he borrowed Rs600,000 from his relatives and friends to go to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, for […]
Unlike other countries in West Asia, Jordan lacks petrodollars. In 1996, an agreement with the US gave the country preferential duty-free and quota-free access to the American market. This was the first such agreement the US ever had with an Arab nation and saw the establishment of Qualifying Industrial Zones (QIZ) – essentially, industrial zones created […]
The 2014 South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) summit took an initiative on the issue of migrant labour. It sought to ensure safety, security, and wellbeing of their migrant workers in the destination countries outside the SAARC region. This was to be done with the help of international bodies such as the International Labour […]