United Arab Emirates Uses Theme Park to ‘Mask the Government’s Serious Human Rights Problems’
The world’s largest indoor theme park, which will feature Cartoon Network and Marvel Comics attractions, will open this year in a Middle East nation riddled with state-sponsored human rights and worker abuses. As reported in Arabian Business, the theme park’s developers plan to open ‘IMG Worlds of Adventure’ and the ‘Cartoon Network Zone’ in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. IMG, Marvel Comics and the Cartoon Network will be seeking tourists for their multi-million-dollar operation in the UAE, where forced labor, abuse of domestic workers, and torture of political dissidents are regular occurrences.
The Alliance for Workers Against Repression Everywhere (AWARE), is calling on these American-companies to take responsibility for the safety and treatment of the workers at the new UAE theme park. Said AWARE Advisory Board Chair Mike Lux, “It’s not all fun and games for the workers building and ultimately working in the Dubai theme parks. Corporations like Marvel and the Cartoon Network must take concrete and transparent steps to ensure that those working at parks that bear their names are treated with respect and dignity.”
One month after a human rights report was issued in the weekly business magazine Arabian Business, Human Rights Watch released a set of guidelines to protect migrant workers in Gulf States, including the UAE, who make up a large portion of construction labor: “International and domestic companies operating in Gulf Cooperation Council countries should adopt the standards to ensure that they and their contractors and sub-contractors respect the rights of migrant workers on their projects and to protect workers from serious abuses, including trafficking and forced labor.”
Migrant workers in the UAE make up 99% of the nation’s private sector workforce and many are laborers in the massive construction industry proliferating in Dubai. The UAE, however, monstrously fails to protect workers or reign in companies that routinely charge migrants unlawful recruiting fees, deny promised wages, or use a sponsorship system that promotes forced labor and slave-like relationships between migrant workers and employers. Female domestic workers in the UAE are also routinely held against their will with visas confiscated and subjected to food deprivation, forced confinement, unpaid wages and physical or sexual abuse (HRW). Myriad newspapers and NGOs have uncovered these despicable working conditions for migrant laborers in the UAE. An Independent report found workers locked inside penitentiary-like dorms, sleeping sometimes 14 to a room.
IMG and its new theme park investors must be responsible for ensuring their workers’ safety and pressuring the local government to uphold universal human rights laws. These two American companies, Marvel Comics and the Cartoon Network, must also be held accountable for what they endorse and how they profit, even indirectly, from nations that abuse their workforce. Spreading their global brand on the backs of mistreated workers or implicitly endorsing state-sponsored abuse is immoral, bad business and should not be sanctioned by American voters, companies or consumers.
The Alliance for Workers Against Repression Everywhere (AWARE), a nonprofit organization working to bring international attention to policies and business tactics that harm workers’ rights around the world, calls on the Government of the UAE to provide transparency in their worker and human rights records, and to enact new laws and regulations that meet minimal ethical and moral standards for workers. The people of the Emirates and any potential tourists to the country should boycott visiting the new theme park or risk condoning human rights abuses. People everywhere can make a difference and any American who travels to this region of the world should demand that the UAE uphold human rights laws.
Headed by worker rights advocate, Mike Lux, AWARE has a specific focus on the rights of oppressed workers who endure a range of abuses. Lux said, “When major American corporations enter into business with countries that operate like the mafia, with no less horrendous crimes committed or blood on their hands, American consumers have a right to know. Transparency and accountability are necessary baselines for ethical business. Guaranteeing the consumer’s end product or experience was not made by forced or slave labor should go without saying.”
