ABSTRACT
The scholar and writer Mike Davis (2006) paints an eye-opening and at times frightening picture of the ever-expanding city of Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates. Somehow invisible to most people who visit the gleaming new shopping malls, extraordinary mega-projects, and vertiginously high skyscrapers of Dubai, are its migrant workers, mainly from India and Pakistan, who have laboured as contract construction workers and constitute something to the tune of 25% of Dubai’s workforce. While the elite and the middle classes live out their more luxurious air-conditioned daily lives, many migrant workers toil 6 days a week, for 12 hours a day in the heat of this desert city. Racial or religious discrimination are common, as are the close watch of security guards and spies within the workforce. Employers sometimes disappear and never pay the required wages. Migrant workers live in squalid quarters, sometimes up to 12 people in a room. Working toilets and air conditioning are an unheard of luxury; in many cases, so is running water in remote desert camps from which workers are bussed to construction sites in the centre of Dubai. The term ‘contract-worker’ is employed, but this is little more than a euphemism. Passports are often confiscated at airports by recruitment agents; visas control their movements as they are tied to a particular employer. South Asian workers are said to be banned
from up-market shopping malls, golf courses, and expensive restaurants. The United Arab Emirates does not observe the International Labour Organizations’ labour regulations and has refused to be signatory to the International Migrant Workers convention. Human Rights Watch estimated that perhaps more than 800 people have lost their lives in construction work, covered up by the government and unreported by companies. Davis (2006) explains the government’s attitude towards its migrant workers:
Dubai’s police may turn a blind eye to illicit diamond and gold imports, prostitution rings, and shady characters who buy 25 villas at a time in cash, but they are diligent in deporting Pakistani workers who complain about being cheated out of their wages by unscrupulous contractors, or jailing Filipina maids for ‘adultery’ when they report being raped by their employers. To avoid the simmering volcano of Shiite unrest that so worries Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, Dubai and its UAE neighbours have favoured a non-Arab workforce drawn from western India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal and the Philippines. But as Asian workers have become an increasingly restive majority, the UAE has reversed course and adopted a ‘cultural diversity policy’ – ‘we have been asked not to recruit any more Asians’, explained one contractor – and to reinforce control over the workforce by diluting the existing national concentrations with more Arab workers.
