Timeline of Events
In 2004, the Abu Dhabi Tourism Authority (ADTA) commissioned the Tourism Development and Investment Company (TDIC) to develop Saadiyat Island into a leisure, residential, business, and tourist center. Saadiyat Island is expected to host major cultural institutions such as Guggeheim Abu Dhabi (designed by Frank Gehry), Louvre Abu Dhabi (Jean Nouvel), Zayed National Museum (Norman Foster), Maritime Museum (Tadao Ando), and Performing Arts Center (Zaha Hadid).
In June 2010, we sent a letter signed by 43 artists to the Guggenheim Foundation requesting that the Foundation obtain contractual guarantees that will protect the rights of workers employed in the construction and maintenance of its new branch museum in Abu Dhabi. While we support the building of museums, universities, cultural foundations, and collections in Abu Dhabi, we also feel that such an infrastructure should not be built on the backs of exploited workers. In our letter we stated, “Our cooperation with the Guggenheim in Abu Dhabi will not be forthcoming if the Foundation fails to take steps to safeguard the rights of the workers who will be employed in the museum’s operations on Saadiyat Island.”
We followed our letter with meetings with Richard Armstrong, Director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation, and Nancy Spector, Deputy Director and Chief Curator. Armstrong and Spector assured us that the Foundation is committed to fair labor standards in the building of the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi on the Saadiyat Island. The Foundation requested some time in order to pursue the development of employment policies with their partners in Abu Dhabi, TDIC (The Abu Dhabi Tourism and Development Investment Company). We agreed not to make our letter public in the meantime. We followed our meetings with Armstrong and Spector with meetings with Human Rights Watch (HRW). HRW updated us on the findings published in their 2009 report titled The Island of Happiness: Exploitation of Migrant Workers on Saadiyat Island, Abu Dhabi. NYU faculty and students also shared with us their efforts to secure similar protections for the construction workers who will be building the NYU Abu Dhabi campus, also on Saadiyat Island.
In June 2010, the TDIC’s Employment Practices Policy was made public, followed in September 2010, by the TDIC/Guggenheim Statement of Shared Values. The released statements made public commitments by TDIC and the Guggenheim Foundation to uphold many workers’ rights protections. However, the released documents failed to address a number of issues such as the absence of independent monitoring of employers’ compliance with human rights standards, and about the lack of an effective enforcement mechanism. Our view is that unless a monitor is empowered to make random visits to work sites and maintain a relationship independent of employer influence, violations will persist and continue to be under-reported. Similarly, without explicit mechanisms for enforcing the terms of the contract or clearly enumerated remedies in the event of breaches, all efforts to protect workers will be in vain. In subsequent communication with the Guggenheim Foundation, we made these concerns clear, and urged the Foundation to address this and other considerations such as provisions related to the payment of recruitment fees, freedom of movement for workers, health and safety provisions, accommodations, monitoring of wage payments, and rest and leisure time for workers, among others
By March 2011, we noted little progress on the issues we raised, even after TDIC announced that it is committed to the appointment of a dedicated independent consultancy company sometime soon.
We decided to make our letter public.
