Workers Rights and Unemployment Issues in Qatar and United Arab Research Paper

Workers Rights and Unemployment Issues in Qatar and United Arab Emirates - Research Paper Example As a result of it, there was a manifestation of the large exploitation of the millions of low wage workers employed in the dangerous and dirty jobs in the various manufacturing companies. Most of the works that these workers were given include construction, cleaning services and domestic work and most of them are migrant workers. Likewise, the United Arab Emirates also gets a large portion of its labor pool from migrant workers mostly from South Asia. According to figures from 2005, 95 percent of the United Arab Emirates labor pools are migrants (Human Rights Watch, 2007). This translates to about 2.7 million workers most of who work in the construction and domestic service industries a scenario that is similar to Qatar’s laborers. Still just like Qatar, there are cases where most of the migrant workers are faced with problems whereby they are not given the work that they are promised when they are going to the country. Actually, in place of this, there is a lot of mistreatmen t by employers, especially for those who work in domestic areas and lack of proper bargaining channels by those who are employed in construction companies and other public places. The United Arab Emirates had a Draft Labor Law which the government opened for public review and comment on the 5th of February, 2007. There were quite a number of changes that were pointed out for change with some of the areas in need for urgent reform being the exclusion of provisions on workers’ rights to organize and bargain collectively, this included the prohibition of strikes, the exclusion of certain category of workers such as the domestic, farming and grazing workers from the protection of labor laws (Human Rights Watch, 2007). In... This essay stresses that unemployment is a critical social and economic problem in both developed and developing countries and the United Arab Emirates, though rich oil based company has not escaped this problem. Before the independence of the country, its economy was dominated by economic activities such as fishing and little agriculture. However, with the discovery of oil, and the rise of oil prices in the 1970’s provided the country with financial resources which enabled it to make a lot of economic development programs and created employment opportunities. This paper makes a conclusion that the United Arab Emirates seems to be having some issues with regard to worker rights and labor laws that are supposed to take care of the rights of the workers. This is the same case in Qatar where there are still cases of employer mistreatment and many other issues with regard to unfavorable work conditions. It will take the intervention of the governments of both countries to ensure that labor conditions are favorable. The aspect of Human Rights has become a sensitive issue the world over and these two countries are on the spotlight since they have to come up with laws that favor both the nationals and migrants who are many in their countries. Unemployment is not much of an issue in these two countries since they are among countries with the lowest rate of unemployment but they can still make the situation better by creating more employment opportunities and ensuring that the workers in the private sector are treated better.