…emerging market laborers live and work in virtual slavery while building NYU’s Abu Dhabi outpost.

As the recipient of NYU’s largesse—a direct gift from the same president, John Sexton, who has pushed the NYU Abu Dhabi project—Skip Gates is now complicit in modern day slavery. For someone whose life and work are so deeply invested in exploring the terrible wrong of American slavery, this is problematic at best.

Virtually every one said he had to pay recruitment fees of up to a year’s wages to get his job and had never been reimbursed. N.Y.U.’s list of labor values said that contractors are supposed to pay back all such fees. Most of the men described having to work 11 or 12 hours a day, six or seven days a week, just to earn close to what they had originally been promised, despite a provision in the labor statement that overtime should be voluntary.

The men said they were not allowed to hold onto their passports, in spite of promises to the contrary. And the experiences of the BK Gulf strikers, a half dozen of whom were reached by The Times in their home countries, stand in contrast to the standard that all workers should have the right to redress labor disputes without “harassment, intimidation, or retaliation.”

Some men lived in squalor, 15 men to a room….

Skip Gates heavily subsidized apartment, which he apparently only uses on occasional weekends, has two bedrooms. Or, put another way, enough room to house 30 Bangladeshi workers…