Camp conditions in Bahrain questioned

See photos of the terrible living conditions of an unregistered labour camp

There are believed to be around 250,000 unskilled construction workers living in Bahrain and human rights groups say the vast majority live in dilapidated and dangerous labour camps. Bahrain editor Benjamin Millington gets a firsthand account and takes an in-depth look at the issue.

Down a narrow laneway in the Bahraini suburb of Diraz, tucked away amongst a string of modest family villas, is a small unassuming concrete building with a roof of loosely fixed corrugated iron sheets.

To the passer by, it might look like something hastily built to store old tools or use as a weekend workshop. But it is in fact home to 20 migrant construction workers.

This is one of Bahrain’s unregistered labour camps and there are hundreds of them across the Kingdom according to Migrant Workers Protection Society’s (MWPS) safety and welfare committee head Sathis Kumar.

The camps range in size and shape, but Kumar says they generally have a number of things in common – they are overcrowded, uncomfortable, unhygienic, poorly constructed, dilapidated, and dangerous.

“This used to be a car shed and they just added on some rooms,” says Kumar standing outside the camp in Diraz.
“There are four bedrooms, five people in each room, two toilets and two kitchens, but you cannot even call them kitchens.

“The biggest danger is fire. Every year workers are killed when places like this catch on fire and it can happen so easily.”

Inside the camp there are people everywhere. Some ignore us while others seem grateful for the attention and obligingly point out the hardships.

The kitchens are a collection of dirty cupboards and kerosene fuelled portable stoves. The bedrooms are windowless and overcrowded. The concrete bathrooms consist solely of a toilet and a cold water tap. And the sheet roofing, which has many gaps, offers little protection from the cold, heat, wind, dust and rain.

Overall it’s hard to imagine how 20 men live in such conditions, but Kumar says they are given no other option by their
employers.

The four small contracting firms jointly lease the premises and Kumar says neither them nor the landlord are willing to make improvements.

“We have been coming to this camp for the last 10 years and in that time nothing has changed,” says Kumar.

“Only last year we got the landlord to install air conditioning, that’s it, and it still gets extremely hot in here during summer - it’s a small consolation.”

Kumar says MWPS has complained to the Northern Municipality about the Diraz camp’s condition and an inspector was sent to the site, but nothing was done.

“The inspector saw the conditions and they promised to improve them,” he says.

“But after that nothing happened because the building owner has some relatives in the municipality which they used to escape from the law.

“Otherwise this building would have been demolished.”

Construction Week has made several visits and phone calls to the Northern Municipality regarding the issue, but no one was available for comment.

MWPS spokesperson Marietta Dias says it’s a typical result.

“They are always launching investigations but you never hear any results. They have not been conditioned to follow things up like governments in other countries,” she says.

“If anything is going to happen then someone has to take it up and follow it through with the appropriate government office, but this can take many visits.

“Basically unless you’re willing to be dogged about it then nothing is ever going to happen.”

Dias says organisations like MWPS and the embassies do their best to help migrant workers but suffer from a lack of manpower which relegates labour camps to the bottom of the priorities list.

“We should be campaigning for these people but for so many reasons we can’t,” she says.

“We have too much on our plate already without dealing with labour camps. It is a huge problem and who else will do it? – nobody.”

Under Bahraini law contractors are required to register any labour camp with the Ministry of Labour who will then carry out routine inspections and enforce the country’s comprehensive laws regarding adequate labour accommodation.

The plan works in theory, but in reality many camps are never registered and other employers simply tell workers to find their own accommodation with limited wages.

The Ministry of Labour’s head of occupational health and safety, Ali Abdulla Makki, concedes it’s a big problem, but not his.

“You will find these cases everywhere in Bahrain with around 30 labourers living in one small house, 10 to 15 people to a room,” he says.

“None of these camps are registered and in many cases the employer gives workers an extra US $26.50 (BHD10) a month to find their own house.

“How can we get records of such cases? These are generally camps in old houses within Manama and Muharraq and it is up to the municipalities to control this.

“We don’t have the manpower, but by certain procedures the municipalities can control it and arrange building inspections or report it to us.”

But the municipalities tell a different story. Jassim Redha Hussain council secretary for Manama Municipality says their inspections only relate to things like the building’s structural integrity but not the “standard of living factors” specified for labour camps.

“There could be 100 people living in a room and if the building complies with our codes then there’s nothing we can do. We know where the camps are. We have a full survey of Manama and know every house which was rented to construction workers in 2008,” he explains.

“But when we say this to the Labour Ministry they say ‘it is not our job, we are in charge of the registered labour camps, not houses’. So it’s nobody’s job. There is a gap in the laws.”

In reality it seems the problem is actually far too big for the ministry or the municipalities to handle alone.
 

If either of them were to start wide-scale enforcement of the law by evicting labourers and demolishing derelict camps, thousands of workers would have nowhere to live – an economic and social disaster.

Simply put, there is currently nowhere else for the workers to go and only the upper echelons of the Bahraini government can solve that problem.

“The government needs to arrange some open land to build accommodation for the labourers, but nobody helps us,” says Manama councillor Abdulmajeed Alsebea.

“Up until now the government says the land is expensive and the contractors should provide the land, but this is not happening, the only way it will work is in partnership with the government.”

Alsebea is the head of a technical committee which has developed a 15 to 20 year plan to build several “labour cities” around Bahrain which would include an array of amenities from supermarkets to temples to cinemas. 

Not only would labourers be given safer and healthier environments to live in, but it would also slowly remove the influx of “expat bachelors” from traditional Bahraini residential areas – the main priority for the municipality.

“There are big cultural differences between the way we live and we don’t want these bachelors living in our family areas,” said Hussain.

“In Manama there are more than 100,000 Indian bachelors – this is a demographic bomb and the biggest concern is that we are losing our identity in our own villages.

“This demographic shift is very important, let alone the other problems like cultural problems, social problems and
crime rates.”

In the Diraz camps these tensions have manifested into harassment and violent attacks on labourers from locals.

The workers say locals regularly start fights, throw stones at them and steal and burn their clothes. One worker told us he received three stitches after being hit in the head by a rock thrown through the camp’s front window.

In a bid to solve the problem Bahrain’s five municipal councils drafted a law last August which would ban labour accommodation in residential zones. This followed the alleged rape of a six-year-old boy by an Asian worker in Isa Town.

Under the proposed law no landlord would be allowed to rent accommodation to bachelors in certain designated residential areas, but Municipalities and Agriculture Affairs Minister Dr Juma Al Ka’abi has reportedly vetoed the move, saying the issue needed extensive study.

If the law was approved, Hussain admits that it would merely shift the problem to other areas, but he hopes it would also force the government into developing a real solution, such as designated labour cities.

Currently, he believes the government is being held back by influential powers in the construction sector and chamber of commerce who are trying to avoid the  cost of relocating more than 200,000 people.

“It is a great shame for us in Bahrain to have these labourers working so hard, getting paid nothing and living in conditions with no dignity,” says Hussain.

“But most Bahrainis do not agree with this. The contractors are the source of the problem because they are not providing proper wages for these people.

“Unfortunately the government will always support the contractors because they are afraid of losing that sector of industry.”

President of Bahrain Contractors Association (BCA) Needham Kameski says no such influence exists and if it did, they would use it to remove the government’s Bahrainisation policy and the monthly $26 (BHD10) fee that contractors pay for every expatriate worker.

Kameski says these factors are fuelling the demand for illegal visa workers which he claims make up 90% of the people living in poor labour camps.

“These people are runaways and they will accept living 20 people to a room in the heart of Manama,” he says.
“If the government removes Bahrainisation and these fees then it will drastically cut demand for free visa workers and we will see many of the poor labour camps close down.

“Most of the legal contractors have beautiful labour camps as per the labour laws.”

So far there has been no such move from the government, but private Bahraini developer Tameer is currently constructing a labour camp to house 20,000 workers as part of their Bahrain Investment Wharf (BIW) industrial development.

The project is due to be completed by January 2010 and will be twenty times bigger than other labour camps in the
Kingdom.

It is certainly a step in the right direction, but critics say it will go nowhere near solving the problem and with the majority of blocks to be sold to larger contractors, employees of smaller contractors such as those in the Diraz camp will remain out in the cold.