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Manama: A leading Bahraini businessman on Thursday charged that the recent strikes by expatriate labourers were partly encouraged by international rights and political forces seeking to settle them in the GCC states.
“The visible picture is that the labourers go on strike because they want to improve their living conditions and receive better wages,” Othman Shareef said.
“But the undeclared reason is a drive to have the labourers eventually settle in the Gulf and integrate,” Shareef, a board member of the Bahrain Chamber for Commerce and Industry (BCCI), said in a press statement.
Human rights organisations and governments are behind the drive to keep the labourers in the GCC and integrate them in the local societies, he said.
“In some Gulf countries, the labourers are now planning to have their own trade unions, and I am afraid that the decision by Bahrain to allow multiple trade unions will help them set up their own unions and politicise them as they like,” he said.
Bahrain, under international pressure to allow the formation of more than one union in all sectors, has come under attack from local unionists who said that the move would fragment the existing federation of workers and would help the formation of politicised and sectarian trade unions.
“We understand that the spiralling living costs in the Gulf and the amelioration of salaries in the labourers home countries have put them at a disadvantage. Now they have to choose either to go home or to demand higher salaries here through strikes,” said Shareef.
“However, their embassies do not want them to go home for several reasons, including the importance of the labourers’ remittance for their national economies,” he said.
Billions of dollars are sent home annually by mainly Asian migrant workers in the Gulf.
An attempt by the Indian authorities to impose a minimum wage for unskilled labourers in March was shelved after fierce opposition from government officials and contractors who threatened to resort to other countries to hire workers for their massive construction projects.
Last year, Bahrain's labour minister Majeed Al Alawi sparked a controversy when he pushed for imposing a six-year residency cap on unskilled workers.
In January, he warned of an ‘Asian tsunami”, saying that the presence of 17 million foreign workers in the Gulf represented a danger worse than the atomic bomb or an Israeli attack.” His remarks were condemned by rights activists.
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