On May 1, NYU Abu Dhabi announced that 8,600 of the 10,000 workers who were exempted from the labor standards during the construction of the Saadiyat Island campus have been identified. 6,600 of these workers have been paid already and the additional 2,000 will be paid once further contact information is confirmed. As for the remaining 1,400, efforts to identify them will continue over the summer, and after this process ends workers will still be able to come forward to claim compensation. However, active outreach will end after this summer.

This announcement is the outcome of a process which stretches back three years. In May 2014 the New York Times reported that workers faced substandard conditions in the construction of NYUAD’s Saadiyat Campus. This report and others like it sparked an investigation by Nardello & Co. on behalf of NYU.

A year later, in April 2015, the Nardello report was released and outlined how a third of workers were subject to a de facto exemption policy either because the value of the contract was under one million USD, or because they worked on the campus for less than 31 days. Nardello found that this policy was the result of an overly complicated compliance regime, where NYUAD, Tamkeen and Mubadala all had independent compliance monitoring teams, overseen by Mott MacDonald.

In July 2015, NYU appointed consulting firm Currie & Brown to find and pay the 10,000 workers who were formerly exempt from the labor standards. This process involved thousands of calls to employers, 1,000 visits to more than 260 labor camps, a multilingual advertising campaign and a 24/7 hotline and SMS service.

Although Nardello identified that 85 percent of the workers on the campus had to pay recruitment fees — a violation of the labor standards and the Supplier Code of Conduct — workers will not be reimbursed for these fees.

Erum Raza, Chief Compliance Officer, NYU Abu Dhabi, noted that “the wage remediation program is applicable to all employees contracted by a subcontractor who fell outside of the labor standards and compliance oversight, regardless of other circumstances such as whether they paid recruitment fees.”

As Kristina Bogos, an NYU alumna who studied abroad at NYUAD in 2013 and was subsequently hacked and banned from the UAE by the UAE government, wrote, the payment of recruitment fees is illegal on multiple fronts.

“Not only is it illegal by UAE law for recruitment agencies to charge workers recruitment fees,” wrote Bogos. “But NYU's labor standards prohibit the payment of these fees and its new supplier code of conduct even requires employers to reimburse workers for such fees moving forward.”

In addition, 95 percent of the workers interviewed by Nardello had their passports held by their employers, another violation of the labor standards. Of these workers, 28 percent had their passports taken involuntarily. These workers would also not be compensated unless they fell under the de-facto exemption policy.

“Any workers who were physically working on the campus and employed by a subcontractor who fell outside of the compliance program are eligible for these payments, regardless of other circumstances such as whether their passports were withheld,” wrote Raza.

Finally, workers who were employed by BK Gulf and went on strike and were subsequently deported will not be compensated. Nardello could not find whether or not the deportation of the workers who went on strike constituted a breach of the labor standards.

Raza agreed that the strike was not in response to conditions at the NYUAD site, and wrote that “the 2013 strike by BK Gulf employees was a company-wide strike, and did not appear to be caused by worker dissatisfaction with conditions on the NYUAD site.”

Bogos disagreed with this characterization of the events and the response. “If NYU is committed to protecting its workers, past and present,” wrote Bogos, “then picking and choosing which abused and shortchanged workers it is going to repay … sends the opposite message.”

Raza suggested that efforts to repay workers would continue. “We are committed to ensuring that any worker on the NYUAD project receive proper compensation for their work,” wrote Raza, “regardless of how or why they ended their employment.”