Dive Brief:
- New York University has acknowledged that the promised monitoring and reporting of working conditions for laborers building its Shanghai campus was not carried out.
- The university is blaming a real estate consulting firm, Jones Lang LaSalle, for not providing a detailed report. The company says it wasn’t asked to do the monitoring and reporting until last summer, and that it carried out the work as agreed.
- NYU has hired the Paul Hastings law firm to do a retroactive audit of the Shanghai construction project's working conditions, with a public report expected by the end of the month, the New York Times reports.
Dive Insight:
As more U.S. universities expand with overseas outposts, administrators will face more issues related to the local working conditions and government regulations, or lack of regulation, for the treatment of local workers. New York University ran into controversy with the construction of its Abu Dhabi campus, where the Times found that workers were charged high fees to land the jobs, forced to live in squalid conditions, forced to work overtime, not paid the wages they had been promised, and beaten when they tried to strike. Despite the shoddy working conditions, the engineering firm hired by the university to monitor and report on those conditions, Mott MacDonald, issued annual reports that praised how the workers were treated.
