Gulf Arab states dependent on foreign labour for their development but wary of its impact on the demography stressed the temporary nature of their status at a meeting with Asian countries on Monday.
"It has been accepted that the labour force is of contractual temporary nature," Yousuf Abdulghani, the labour ministry assistant under-secretary of host country United Arab Emirates, told reporters.
"This really preserves ... the particularity of the country in terms of population demographics and work-force demographics," he said on the first day of a meeting attended by senior labour officials from 21 Asian and Gulf states.
"This would preserve the demographic nature of the countries of the region," he said in reference to the oil-rich Gulf monarchies, which have a huge expatriate population, in some case outstripping the number of local nationals.
The Abu Dhabi Labour Dialogue is the first of its kind to be held in a major labour-receiving country. Labour ministers are to meet on Tuesday to discuss a draft declaration.
"This is an unprecedented step in the dialogue between the labour-sending and labour-receiving countries," Abdulghani said. The meeting in the Emirati capital builds on the Asian Regional Consultative Process on Overseas Employment and Contractual Labour, known as the Colombo Process.
Set up in 2003, the Colombo Process groups Asian states - Afghanistan, Bangladesh, China, India, Indonesia, Nepal, Pakistan, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Vietnam - to initiate dialogue on overseas labour.
In 2005, the Colombo Process ministers recognised in Bali that the term "expatriate and contractual labour" is a more accurate description of labour flows to the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC).
This term appears to be favoured by the GCC countries rather than "migrant workers", which could imply permanent relocation and possible naturalisation. The six members of the GCC have a total population of 35 million people, around 13 million of whom are expatriates, mostly foreign labourers from Asian countries.
In October, Bahrain's Labour Minister Majeed al-Alawi called for a six-year residency cap on foreign workers. But the booming economies of the GCC countries, which are reaping the benefits of record oil prices, remain in dire need of cheap labour from the Asian sub-continent. On Sunday, New York-based Human Right Watch urged the meeting in Abu Dhabi to adopt measures to halt "widespread violations" of the rights of Asian expatriate workers. "Both labour-sending and labour-receiving countries benefit from migration, but abuse of workers' rights remains rampant," HRW said in a statement.