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    What’s the point of just apologizing?

    It would be nice if the suits at N.Y.U. had some cultural exposure to the Christian tradition (or even AA), where a confession is supposed to include at least attempted resolve not to do the same kind of thing and to make things better. Andrew Ross gets this:

    “Apologizing to the workers is a good thing to do, but the university should use its resources and leverage to change the system that created the abuses,” said Andrew Ross, a professor at N.Y.U.’s New York campus and a leader of Coalition for Fair Labor, a student-faculty group that has called for better worker treatment. “N.Y.U. could help to ensure that all Saadiyat Island workers have a living wage, debt relief and the right to organize.”

    . . .Ramkumar Rai, a Nepali immigrant who worked on the N.Y.U. campus until a year ago, told The Times that he and a friend were still waiting for the last six months’ of his wages, which were 16 months overdue. Told of the apology, he asked, “When will the money come? If the money comes it will be O.K.”

    This makes as much sense as the embedded song above.* We're really sorry, and we're not going to do anything at all to rectify the situation? Why would you think that unless you really felt that there was nothing you could have done about the problem? But then why apologize at all?

    [*Upon hearing it, poor John Lennon realized that side two of Abbey Road (mixed by McCartney and Martin) was really the first Wings album (not withstanding the fact that Sun King, Mean Mr. Mustard, and Polythene Pam were his).]

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    6 responses to “What’s the point of just apologizing?”

    1. Matthew Silverstein Avatar
      Matthew Silverstein

      Jon, on what basis do you assert that NYU is not attempting to make things better? The administration here is actively investigating the allegations made in the NYT piece, and we are committed to doing what we can to remedy the situation. It’s also worth mentioning that NYUAD was the first major project in the region to institute ambitious labor standards for the workers involved in construction. Have we failed to meet those standards in some cases? Obviously the answer is “Yes.” Even one violation would be one too many. But the thousands of workers for whom the standards were upheld have certainly benefited from them, and we have advanced the discussion on labor issues in the Gulf in any number of ways. (For instance, would TDIC, the main developer of Saadiyat Island, have published its own statement of labor values had NYU not led the way? I doubt it.)

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    2. Jon Cogburn Avatar
      Jon Cogburn

      On the basis of the NY Times article to which I linked, from which the above is excerpted, including the quote from Andrew Ross.
      In none of the pieces that Andrew Sullivan linked to did any NYU administrator make any claims about how they might make restitution to the workers they exploited. At no point in the apologies was their any recognition that the situation was entirely for-seeable and people had been warning about this for years. Instead they blamed the contractors while giving non-apologies.

      From the piece linked to above:

      A spokesperson for NYU said this was the first they’d heard about unrest among the workers and that the school is “working with our partners to have it investigated.” The executive director of campus operations for NYU Abu Dhabi added, “We’re not involved in the negotiation of the contracts that the partners are doing, just as they’re not in the negotiation of the contracts that we’re doing. We have a relationship with our partners, and so we have to trust that what they’re coming up with are the reasonable wages on their end.”

      In what universe do people “have to trust” their contractors? That would be a completely risible thing to say in any situation, much less one where the stakes are so high and the bad outcome was predicted by so many people. Pontius Pilate at least knew better than to pretend to apologize while washing his hands.

      Consider Eric Loomis (http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2014/05/empty-apologies):

      NYU could have had someone on site monitoring the labor conditions that would actually try to find out what was going on rather one who papered over problems to make the client happy. It could employ these workers directly and be the responsible party for paying them. It could have constructed its own dormitories for these workers. But of course it did none of these things. NYU administrators were just following the cash. It contracted out the labor and completely forgot about it until the news reports about the exploitation came out. If NYU wants to take real responsibility, it will take on liability for these workers. Otherwise, this falls into the empty “I’m sorry we were caught” category of apology.

      If the New York Times, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, and Andrew Sullivan are all wrong about this, I’ll be very happy to both run corrections and send them e-mails so that they will as well. But you haven’t said anything that contradicts them.

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    3. Matthew Silverstein Avatar
      Matthew Silverstein

      Jon, you have misread the quotation from the executive director of campus operations for NYU Abu Dhabi. The “partners” to whom he is referring are not the contractors employing the workers who have built the campus, but rather our Abu Dhabi government partners. They are the ones contracting with the relevant construction companies. NYUAD itself has no contractual relationship with the contractors and sub-contractors mentioned in the NYT piece. NYUAD does oversee compliance matters with respect to the three hundred or so security guards, janitors, and cafeteria workers who are directly employed by NYUAD. And as the NYT piece acknowledges, any problems with respect to those workers have been swiftly identified and corrected.
      In other words, the official quoted did not say that we just “have to trust” the relevant contractors. And, for what it’s worth, neither NYUAD nor our government partners have just trusted them, which is why our partners retained an internationally recognized firm with a great deal of experience in the Emirates and with large construction projects to oversee the contractors’ and subcontractors’ compliance with our labor standards. That firm’s reports can be found on the NYUAD website. (For the two most recent reports, see http://nyuad.nyu.edu/content/dam/nyuad/departments/public-affairs/documents/pr/NYUAD-Compliance-Report-2012.pdf and http://nyuad.nyu.edu/content/dam/nyuad/departments/public-affairs/documents/pr/NYUAD-Compliance-Report-2011.pdf.) If you read those reports, you will see that there was good reason to believe that those labor standards were being upheld to an extent that is unprecedented in the region. The record was far from perfect, of course, but there were no problems of the sort found by the NYT. And we worked together with our partners to correct the problems that were found. So, contrary to your suggestion, NYU did not “forget about labor” until the reports of exploitation surfaced. It has been on everyone’s mind from the day we arrived here. Had the NYT reporter accepted our offer to have her speak with students and faculty, that would have been made clear to her. (She unfortunately declined that offer.)
      The discovery of the problems identified in the NYT piece has shaken everyone here. Did we place too much faith in the compliance monitoring put into place? It would appear so. Must we strengthen compliance efforts going forward? Absolutely. (The construction of our campus is now complete, but there will probably be additional construction projects in the future.) Yet despite that, NYUAD has almost certainly improved the labor situation in the Gulf overall — by instituting standards that were unprecedented in the region (and thereby setting an example for other institutions), by living up to those standards with respect to the workers we directly employ and to at least many of the workers building our campus, and by making sure that the issue of labor in the Emirates and in the Gulf remains at the forefront of everyone’s mind. (This issue may appear in the NYT or on your radar only when abuses are reported. It is on our radar all of the time.) And as for the specific abuses identified in the NYT piece, the apology was only the first response. As the statements issued by NYUAD and by our government partners make clear, we will do what we can to make good on our labor standards, even after the fact.
      Lastly, your suggestion that NYU is here only to “follow the cash” is both uninformed and offensive. Among other things, it suggests that there is no other reason for us to try to set up a world-class university in Abu Dhabi. We are creating a locus for research and intellectual exchange in a region that could benefit from both. And we are providing a top-notch and uniquely global liberal arts education to hundreds (and, soon, to thousands) of students who would not otherwise be able to receive one. That, at least, is why I am here.

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    4. Jon Cogburn Avatar
      Jon Cogburn

      Mathew,
      First, thanks for sharing this. And let me say again that if at some point someone in power unequivocally states that NYU is going to assume liability for the workers I’ll be happy to put that at the top of the blog and also bother Andrew and the Lawyers, Guns, and Money bloggers about it. I also do realize that there may be legal reasons why they can’t be this forthcoming right now (which doesn’t mean they haven’t made a hash out of the PR).
      I can see how “follow the money” offends you, since it could be read as dismissing all the work you and your colleagues are doing as nothing more than NYU trying to hoover up their own last little bit of petroleum kleptocracy spoils before we finish melting the planet with that same petroleum (this is the kind of line that critics have been making all along). I don’t think that’s the case, and I applaud your efforts. Two friends of mine have recently accepted jobs there and I congratulated their good fortune (and we Louisianans can teach citizens and non-citizens of the Emirates something about what economists call the natural resource curse).
      Here’s the thing though. I’m not the one who said “follow the money.” It was part of a direct quote from the Lawyers, Guns, and Money website to which I provided the link. I linked to that to show that what I wrote in the OP isn’t some idiosyncratic misreading of the situation. I fully accept that it might be a misreading, but if it is it is a very common one and at the very least I don’t think you have been served very well by NYU public relations.
      Again, the point that your own professor, the NY Times, Andrew Sullivan, and several other media outlets are making is that if you are not willing to assume liability for the people who built the campus in dangerous conditions, with seized passports, and unrenumerated, your apologies just ring hollow. I don’t see how your good intentions and the administrators use of subcontractors who have lots of experience working in UAE construction have to do with this. I’m sorry I don’t.

      Here’s Richard Fossey (http://studentdebtcrisis.blogspot.com/2014/05/nyus-abu-dhabi-labor-scandal-president.html):

      But an apology is not enough. NYU, which has one of the most highly-paid presidents in the country and which charges its students more than $60,000 a year for tuition, room and board, should tap its own resources to compensate workers who were exploited during the construction of NYU’s Abu Dhabi campus.
      Or better yet, President Sexton should dig into his own pockets to compensate the wronged construction workers. He is due to get a $2.5 million “length of service” bonus next year, which he really does not need. After all, President Sexton will receive $800,000 annually for the rest of his life when he retires from NYU. And he is currently being paid more than $1 million a month to be NYU’s CEO.

      If President Sexton’s $2.5 million bonus were divided among the 6,000 construction workers who were employed on the Abu Dhabi project, each worker would receive a little more than $400. Four hundred dollars doesn’t seem like much to most Americans, but it represents about a month’s wages to the Abu Dhabi construction workers.

      I’d also recommend Neha Vora’s book on the subject of exploitation of workers in the UAE. Duke University Press is publicizing it in terms of the NYU scandal and non-apology: http://dukeupress.typepad.com/dukeupresslog/2014/05/nyu-scandal-casts-light-on-treatment-of-workers-in-united-arab-emirates.html .
      Finally, the “follow the money” quote is in a context we are all aware of, which is the rising tuition at NYU compared with the opulence of the construction budget and senior administration salaries (see this recent article http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/19/education/study-links-growth-in-student-debt-to-pay-for-university-presidents.html?hp&_r=0).

      NYU professors Patrick Deer and Mark Crispin Miller actually wrote a revealing editorial about this scandal in the Times http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/26/opinion/expand-minds-not-the-nyu-campus.html. It concluded:

      What about N.Y.U. itself? First, the plan is a financial risk. The administration won’t reveal its business plan, but according to N.Y.U.’s Web site, the plan will cost an estimated $6 billion. The debt service alone could strain N.Y.U.’s annual budget. A $2 billion loan, for instance, would mean more than $100 million a year in interest. How will we cover that new debt? Tuition increases? More students? Bigger classes? Unlike Yale or Harvard, we have no large endowment to cushion yearly drops in income. Most of N.Y.U.’s income comes from tuition — a dicey strategy today.
      Nationwide, costs of tuition and fees have more than doubled since 2000. Most students take out loans to pay their way — and struggle more and more to pay them back. According to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, more than a quarter of indebted students are in arrears. Now that outstanding United States student debt has topped $1 trillion — more than the entire population’s credit-card debt — that bubble could finally pop.
      But it’s not just risky to finance this project with more student debt. It’s also wrong. Our graduates are among the most indebted in the nation. We’d rather see such misery ended than prolonged. This brings us to the academic impact. While Mr. Sexton has said often that his plan will make N.Y.U. strong, it will very likely have the opposite effect. This expansion of the university will eventually degrade our student body. Many of our best students have come from poor and middle-income families. If N.Y.U. must raise tuition to handle all that extra debt, applicants with money will be favored over those without. And if we need more students to defray our costs, we must be that much less selective.
      The project will degrade our faculty at once. Like Columbia and Rockefeller, N.Y.U. has drawn top faculty members to this expensive city by offering affordable — and livable — housing. If this plan proceeds, many of our best will move to schools that would not house their employees on construction sites. We who are supposed to hire new talent either have to scare top candidates away by telling them the truth or get them here by keeping mum.
      And as top faculty members depart, or stay away, fewer bright college seniors will be drawn to graduate school at N.Y.U.

      What, then, does this project have to do with education? That N.Y.U. needs space is a reality. That universities must grow to maintain excellence is a delusion. As faculty members who care about our mission at this university, we are obliged to tell the difference.

      It’s probably unfortunate that people are reading the UAE initiative with these things in mind, but they are. The contrast between the opulence and the way the workers were treated (and tuition the students are paying) is just too glaring.

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    5. Matthew Silverstein Avatar
      Matthew Silverstein

      Let me add one further clarification, Jon. It is a mistake to run NYUAD and NYU together on many of these issues. The students at NYU pay very high tuition and graduate with tremendous amounts of debt. That is not the case for the students at NYUAD. All but the very wealthiest receive very generous financial aid packages, and many of our students get a completely free ride.

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    6. Matthew Silverstein Avatar
      Matthew Silverstein

      In case anyone is still interested, a group of NYUAD faculty has published a brief response to the recent coverage: http://chronicle.com/blogs/letters/nyu-abu-dhabi-faculty-our-partners-are-trying-to-do-their-best/. (The title was not of our choosing, for what it’s worth.)

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