•  manama
• Friday, March 04, 2011
• Inter Press Service

Thousands of foreign labourers here are squeezed into houses the government says are uninhabitable, but they are unlikely to get any relief soon, with the non- stop protests in the capital hurting many businesses.

After Tunisia and Egypt, it is Bahrain’s turn to witness protests in the centre of the capital. Seven protesters have died, although there has been no clash between demonstrators and security forces since Feb. 17. Protesters have refused to budge from the Pearl Roundabout, a few kilometres from Bahrain’s Financial Harbor and World Trade Center.

Businesses in the area are reporting losses, with customers choosing to stay away. Among those affected is Bahrain’s largest central market, which employs thousands of migrant workers.

The protests have likewise brought the hotel industry to its knees, with numerous room bookings, conferences, exhibitions, and even wedding parties being cancelled, said Anwar Abdulrahman, columnist and editor-in chief of the first Bahrain-based newspaper Akhbar Al Khaleej.

This decline in business means that employers will be unable to afford proper labour camps for their workers. Businessman Isa Mohammed said the current situation makes it impossible for him to provide proper housing for his workers. Isa owns a barber shop and three mobile phone stores that employ eight workers, all of them renting an old house for less than 150 dollars a month.

'Even before the unrest that badly affected my incomes, I wasn’t able to shift them to a better place, because I’m paying monthly around 25 dollars as a tax for each of them,' Isa said. A huge number of foreign migrant workers here in Bahrain live in crumbling and unsafe homes, the only kind most of them can afford.

'In 2009, we have issued warnings for 250 home owners to renovate their homes before giving them for rent and got orders from the Public Prosecutor Office to demolish 80 homes in the same city for being unfit for living,' said Minister of Municipalities and Urban Development Dr Juma Al Kaabi. 'If all concerned official organisations will apply rules and conditions related to labour camps, then 90 percent of those camps should be evacuated for being unfit for living.'

Official statistics show Bahrain had 290,000 foreign labourers as of 2009. More than two-thirds of them live in Manama and Muharraq, Bahrain’s second largest city. The 2010 Census released in February shows that expatriates have been streaming into Bahrain over the past nine years, and are the reason the population has nearly doubled from 650,000 in 2001 to 1,234,571 in 2010.

Expatriates workers, who make up 54 percent of the population, fill a wide range of occupations, from labourers to company chairpersons. But the majority of them are employed in low paying jobs as construction and factory workers, shopkeepers, tailors and crafters. The majority are poor Asians - Indians, Bangladeshis and Pakistanis - who cannot afford high rent or are unable to get better accommodation from their employers.

© Inter Press Service (2011) — All Rights Reserved. Original source: Inter Press Service

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