‘Indian workers are central to Middle East oil — yet, they’re unseen’

Andrea Wright is Professor of Anthropology and Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at William and Mary University. Speaking with Srijana Mitra Das in ET Evoke, she outlines Indian migrants shaping the oil industry of the Gulf — and why there is little discussion of them, both in war and peace:

Q. When did the migration drive from India to the Middle East really pick up — and what do most migrant workers there do?

A. I’ve studied Indians migrating to work in the Middle East since the beginning of the oil industry. Oil was discovered in Iran in 1908 — soon thereafter, Indians were working in Iran’s oil industry. In the 1930s, when oil production began in Bahrain, large numbers of Indians started working there as well. My most recent book ‘Unruly Labour’ looks at Indians in the oil industry from its origin until the 1970s. My first book ‘Between Dreams and Ghosts’ looked at the contemporary migration of Indians to the Gulf. It mostly focused on men working in what are called unskilled or semi-skilled positions in oil and gas.


Interestingly, today, large numbers of unskilled workers come to the Gulf from India, the Philippines, Pakistan and Bangladesh. But, historically, most Indians who migrated were skilled tradesmen — while most of the manual workers in the industry were local Gulf Arabs. So, there has been a change in manual labour there.

Q. What is the scale of difference between working in the Gulf versus employment in India in earnings — and thus, remittances?

A. It’s quite large. Most people tell me they earn 6 to 10 times the amount working in the Gulf as they do in India, which is particularly true for manual workers. It’s slightly different with highly skilled positions but most unskilled or semi-skilled workers make 6 to 10 times more.

Q. Broadly speaking, what are the working conditions of such migrant labourers in the Middle East?

A It’s variable. Many male workers I know live in dorms there — there are six or eight men in a room with bunk beds, mostly in dormitories quite far from the city centre. I’ve interviewed over a thousand workers who’ve migrated to the Gulf and I’d say the vast majority of them really miss their families. They feel extremely lonely and they are always worried about their obligations to their kin but they are also proud of how they’re contributing to their families and communities by sending their remittances. There are examples of workers who are poorly treated, even abandoned. In 2010, there were some workers in a company in the UAE, the owner of which suddenly left the country. The workers had not been paid although they’d been working for some years. Also, they didn’t have any food or water because all that had been provided by their employer. So, they were dependent on workers at nearby camps to help. Finally, a group raised money for their tickets to get home. But that’s rare. The Gulf states have worked to improve conditions — however, even when everything’s going right, people are often deeply lonely while performing very hard work.

Q. What is the history of strikes and unions in the Middle East?

A. Interestingly, when we look at the Arabian Peninsula today, there are no strikes, nor unions — yet, in the 1920s to the 1940s, we see many strikes by workers from different nationalities coming together. Then, beginning in the late 1940s, we see fewer and fewer strikes called by these large international coalitions.

Instead, there are increasingly strikes by nationality. In the early 1950s, all Indian workers in Aden who were building a refinery went on a hunger strike, everyone from managers to manual workers. They believed they were being treated with racism, their accommodation wasn’t good and they were being served poor-quality food with beef. So, they went on a hunger strike — newspapers in India wrote about it and the Indian government stepped in, ensuring changes. In the 1950s, local Gulf Arabs went on strike, asking for more changes to governance, more democratic processes or more say in how the wealth from oil money was spent. Then, in the late 1950s, we see a series of very restrictive labour laws that first made it hard to unionise or go on strike, eventually making it illegal to do either. By the 1960s, workers’ strikes stopped.

Q. You’ve written about ‘genealogies of consent and security in Indian labour migration’ — could you elaborate?

A. These are two separate but interrelated concepts. I found while Indians can make a lot more money working in the Gulf, they also often borrow large amounts to go through the emigration process. Recruiting agents legally charge a certain amount but often, they end up borrowing money on top of that just to get through the interview process, particularly if they have emigration check required (ECR) passports. I was curious about why there are emigration check passports now — both recruiting agents and government officials in India said they wanted to protect the most vulnerable workers. Researching the history of emigration regulations, I found they emerged over indentured labour, in part because of concerns that indentured workers in the 1800s going to work throughout the British Empire didn’ t really know about their working conditions and this was actually a new form of slavery. The emigration system, which includes both the Protector of Emigrants and emigration check requirements, emerged from concerns over indentured workers not in truth being able to consent to their work. Later, although indentured labour dwindled, the process to move large numbers of workers was used by oil companies to send Indians to the oil fields. It’s only relatively recently that the system became less restrictive on who needs emigration permission.

The security angle is looking at how the oil industry became a focus of national security. This was related to imperial military power when the British switched their navy to being completely oil-powered. By the mid-20th century, every navy in the world was powered by oil, as were almost all merchant ships. So, oil is profoundly connected to national military and economic power — this explains the Persian Gulf becoming a site of geostrategic importance. With oil looming large over the world economy, what you really wanted were workers who were not able to go on strike and could be controlled. Increasingly, oil companies preferred to hire migrant workers from India, Pakistan and now, the Philippines, as opposed to hiring local workers. This is in part because they can just fire the former i f t hey go on strike and they don’ t h ave to listen to their political complaints. Also, the oil industry has very variable labour needs — to build an oil refinery, you need 10,000 workers. But to run an oil refinery, you need around 100. So, companies address this difference by hiring migrant workers on very short contracts.

Q. We often think of Indian migrant labour to the Middle East as being mostly male — is that correct?

A. Actually, large numbers of women work in multiple arenas there. Domestic workers is one sector but there are also women who migrate as professionals, working as managers of factories, HR officers, etc. However, when we think about the nearly one million immigration-check required passports that are going, the majority of those are men. Q. Given the Iran war now and the stretching uncertainty caused by it, how would you sum up the situation of migrant workers in the Middle East today? A. People feel very unsure of the future and anxious about their prospects — many are losing their jobs or trying to return home as the future with this war looks so uncertain.

Q. There is so much discussion around the price of oil now, shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, etc. — yet, why are millions of migrant workers in the Middle East relatively invisible from sight or talk?

A. I think a lot of work has been done to structure labour in general — and migrant workers in particular — as being precarious and, in some ways, invisible. In the Gulf, migrant workers often live in camps that are separate from the general population — there aren’t a lot of ways in which their experiences are visible in people’ s daily lives. That makes it hard to understand both the large numbers of workers living in the Gulf and how vulnerable they are. This comes with factors like how everyone is on short contracts and everyone feels temporary globally, from a cab driver to a delivery worker. Temp work makes labour invisible and hard to statistically count, see, take pictures of and thereby, to empathise.

Q. What distinguishes — or does not — an Indian migrant labourer in the Middle East from, say, a Mexican agricultural labourer who is brought in seasonally to work in the United States?

A. When my first book ‘Between Dreams and Ghosts’ came out, many people who work on migration from Latin America to the US told me, ‘This is exactly the same as what I see’. I think that’s how capitalism operates, particularly with some neoliberal ideologies about everyone trying to profit-maximise — that legitimates the bad treatment of workers because the assumption is that all people are able to weigh all risk, There’s also how corporate policies work, putting workers and migrants increasingly at risk. Even with issues like safety, there are rules that blame workers for not following safety procedures as opposed to worksites themselves not being safe. Further, practices like hiring people on a short-term basis or contracting work out removes risk from corporations, putting it onto individuals. All these forces make workers more vulnerable, impacting both Indian migrants to the Gulf and Mexican migrant labourers to the United States.

Q. What has been the greatest contribution of Indian migrant labourers — who are otherwise fairly overlooked, except for their remittances — to the oil industry of the Middle East?

A. Indians are central to the entirety of the oil industry in the Middle East from its foundation. We cannot imagine the oil industry as it is without India. When the oil industry began in the Gulf, Indians who worked at Burma Oil started moving there — this international expertise of Indians helped to build and sustain the Gulf oil industry. It continues to do so today.


Views expressed are personal