The Higher Corporation for Specialised Economic Zones (HCSEZ), which runs Musaffah and other industrial zones, will oversee the construction of the project.
The decision to build houses in those areas followed repeated complaints by workers about poor living conditions and unannounced visits by inspectors from Abu Dhabi Municipality and Ministry of Labour to company quarters and stores, which housed thousands of workers, mostly Asians.
“We have intensified our inspection campaigns in Musaffah industrial city over the past few weeks and uncovered massive violations of the laws,” said Yasser Ali Mohammed, director of Musaffah Municipality.
“All offenders have been served notices while we have placed a notice in local newspapers warning those companies to redress the situation and improve the living conditions of their workers. We have given them a deadline, after which the offenders will be prosecuted,” he told Abu Dhabi Television.
Mohammed said the deadline was only a temporary solution, adding that those employers would have to provide separate houses for their workers.
“We have held a series of meetings with HCSEZ, Abu Dhabi Department of Planning and Economy and Ministries of Labour and Interior to discuss a permanent solution to this problem,” he said.
“We have reached an agreement that permission should be granted to those companies to build proper houses for their workers. We agreed that HCSEZ will oversee the implementation of this decision.”
Abu Dhabi Television hosted Mohammed after its team visited Musaffah and filmed those workers in makeshift houses inside company warehouses. At least 10 of them were crammed in a small room that lacked basic sanitary conditions.
Some of them slept on blankets on the floor while others mounted three-level bed structures. The film showed flies and other insects were their constant companions as they were attracted by the hot living quarters and scattered dirt and cooked rice. The room lacked a washbasin and a bathroom and the workers share a single toilet just outside the warehouse. Their wash was hanging on ropes tied inside their living room that looked like both an untidy kitchen and a laundry.
When the Abu Dhabi Television reporter, a UAE national, entered a room housing 12 Bangladeshi workers, he immediately covered his nose with his hand. “This room has a very bad smell,” he told the workers, most of whom could not understand what he said as they spoke neither Arabic nor English. “How can you live here? Why don’t you clean the place?”
But one of them approached the reporter and said in broken Arabic: “What do you expect when you see all of us living in one room without essential sanitary facilities? We have been suffering from this for years but no one listens to us.”
Musaffah, one of the largest industrial zones in the Gulf, houses thousands of companies involved in various types of activities. At least 5,000 workers are employed by those firms, mostly from Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and India.