In a Sept. 14 town hall on labor issues, NYU Abu Dhabi students were given the clearest statement yet on the university’s response to strike actions during the construction of Saadiyat Campus.

Vice Chancellor Al Bloom stated that since striking is illegal in the UAE, NYU will not be required to reimburse or compensate employees who took industrial action, whether or not those employees are found to have been exempted from NYU's labor standards.

This year, NYU announced that it will compensate workers who took part in the construction of Saadiyat Campus under substandard conditions after their employers were exempted from the university's labor standards. Roughly one third of total laborers had been working for exempted employers, exposing them to possible abuse.

However, NYU will not be compensating any of these workers if they had also been caught on strike during the projects.

The number of workers who were on strike and had also suffered from employer non-compliance is unclear. An investigation by consulting firm Currie & Brown is underway."

The Statement of Labor Values, the governing document regarding NYU’s rights and obligations towards its employees, states that “the right of workers to seek resolution of labor disputes shall be recognized and respected. No worker shall be subject to harassment, intimidation or retaliation in their efforts to resolve work disputes.”

This right is also enshrined within UAE labor law, which dictates the rights of employees to resolve work disputes through collective bargaining. Chapter 9 of the UAE labor law sets down that employees can resolve their disputes with their employer by writing down and submitting their request to the employer, as well as the government's labor department.

Erum Raza, Chief Compliance Officer at the NYUAD Office of Compliance and Risk Management, maintains that workers had other options to resolve disputes besides striking.

“Compliance monitoring included worker interviews and inspections, which ensured that workers understood their rights; the Statement of Labor Values was also communicated to these workers in their native languages,” wrote Raza.

Whether workers had accurate knowledge of the other options available to them remains unclear, however.

Nardello & Co., the company appointed to investigate allegations of labor standards violations in the construction of NYUAD’s campus, notes in their report that Mott MacDonald, EC Harris and AFC Carillion, who oversaw the project and monitored compliance, were all unaware of the strike, which involved approximately 4000 workers, 1500 of which were working on the NYUAD site.

After hearing of the strike, EC Harris and Mott MacDonald did not include it in their respective compliance reports.

BK Gulf, the company that had employed the workers who went on strike, asserted in the Nardello & Co. report that they had made it clear to workers that, if they did not return to work, they would be dismissed. Nardello & Co. could not find one worker that corroborated this claim. Many of the workers who went on strike were beaten, slapped and tased. Several workers were deported despite not being involved in the strike.

Another 145 workers, directly employed by the construction company Al Reyami, went on strike in June 2012. These workers had previously complained to company management about substandard treatment but were ignored. Al Reyami had asked for four strikers to come as representatives of the wider group to negotiate with management.

After the designation of these representatives, all four were immediately dismissed and the rest of the workers were threatened with the same punishment if the strike continued. Mott MacDonald found that the firing of these four workers was justified.

The Supplier Code of Conduct, which was instituted in 2013 after the Al Reyami strike occurred, requires that  “all Contractors who we engage must have an internal grievance procedure, which must be communicated to workers, and which workers must understand,” wrote Raza.

It is unclear whether Al Reyami paid the workers what it owed them in withheld wages after the strikes.

In an email to the entire NYU community, NYU President John Sexton does not mention the Al Reyami strike. He said that, “We do believe that workers should have a means of having their concerns heard and labor disputes should be resolved in a peaceful manner, and that media reports regarding the treatment of strikers were disturbing in this regard.”

When asked whether NYU will provide compensation, Raza wrote that, “The Nardello report makes clear there is no evidence to suggest that the strike was related to worker dissatisfaction on the NYUAD project.”

In July, NYU appointed Currie and Brown, a consulting firm, to oversee the back-payment of wages to workers who were outside of the protections of the Statement of Labor Values. The results of this investigation are expected to be finalized within the next 12 to 18 months.

As of now it is not known where the workers who went on strike are, or how many in total went on strike, with the Nardello report only providing approximate numbers.

Raza also wrote: “We do not have additional information regarding these workers beyond what was contained in the Nardello & Company report.”