New York University (NYU) has pledged to compensate thousands of migrant workers who built its new campus in Abu Dhabi after an investigation found that roughly a third were excluded from safeguards intended to stop them from being abused and exploited.

About 10,000 people were not covered by the university’s labour guidelines, which were meant to protect them from exploitative conditions including forced labour, poor wages, illegal recruitment fees and associated debts, squalid living conditions, and abuse and harassment, according to a report by the international investigations firm Nardello & Co.

The report found that the system monitoring compliance with the guidelines was flawed, with local contractors – including Mubadala, a real estate company owned by the Abu Dhabi government – exploiting a loophole to exempt some subcontractors from the labour guidelines, which increased their profits. It concluded that “this practice … created a significant gap in coverage that disenfranchised thousands of workers from the protections contemplated by the labo[u]r guidelines”.

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