Indian Migrants Shaped Middle East Oil Industry From Its Beginnings: Expert

Professor Andrea Wright has studied Indian migration to 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 them if they go on strike and they don't have to listen to their political complaints.

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.

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.

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.