ABSTRACT
The 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 (UAE). 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 Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan, the Philippines, and Sri Lanka, who have laboured as contract construction workers and constitute something to the tune of 25 per cent of Dubai’s workforce. It was estimated in the mid-2000s that some 700,000 migrants had entered the UAE for work (Buckley 2013). While the elite and the middle classes live out their more luxurious air-conditioned daily lives, many migrant workers toil six days a week, for twelve hours a day in the heat of this desert city. Racial or religious discrimination is common, as are the close watch of security guards and spies within the workforce. Employers sometimes disappear and never pay the required wages or they hold wages from their employees for months (‘wage theft’). Migrant workers live in squalid quarters, in effect barracks that sometimes house 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 and segregated desert camps from which workers are bussed to construction sites in the centre of Dubai. The term ‘contract-worker’ is employed, which refers to the Gulf-wide Kafala system; a so-called ‘sponsor system’ in which the legal and economic responsibility of every foreign worker (from construction to domestic work) must be ensured by a UAE citizen for the duration of the contract. In this system, obtaining citizenship or even permanent residency is nearly impossible (e.g. Buckley 2013; Pande 2013), and as Mike Davis remarked, this sponsorship system 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. Migrant workers are effectively 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. In fact, their lives are harsh to the point that much of migrant workers’ social reproduction in terms of food, hygiene, and health is usually left to expatriate elites in the form of small charities, as well as international construction companies. The work of charities and the provision of companies have been tolerated by Dubai’s municipal government and the police, precisely because they concern workers’ corporeal (bodily) needs, rather than their political desires (Buckley 2013; Davis 2006). Davis explains the government’s attitude and practices 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. (Davis 2006: 66)
It however does not stop at, let us say, Pakistani construction workers; Dubai’s police may even throw Filipina maids into prison on the grounds of ‘adultery’ if they report that their employers have raped them. At the same time, weary of Shiite unrest in neighbouring Bahrain and Saudi Arabia,
the governments of Dubai and the other emirates of the UAE have preferred a non-Arab labour force from mainly South Asia. Yet as these same immigrants became politically active during the mid-2000s, these governments implemented a ‘cultural diversity policy’ which reversed course and turned back to Arab workers to ‘dilute’ the Asian work force (p. 66). Employers however have failed to find the citizen workers that have been required by the government. Citizens simply did not wish to work for the $100 to $150 a month that construction firms paid in the mid-2000s. In fact, around the same time, migrant workers began to strike, mainly to protest their low pay and wage theft, the squalid, illsanitized, yet expensive accommodation, and inadequate transportation to and from work (their only source of transportation). By 2007, some 30,000 to 40,000 workers were involved in a two-week strike. Paradoxically, it was precisely the segregation of urban space that served both to strengthen the protests and to quell them. On one hand, workers galvanized around common issues, word spread easily between camps, and protests would oscillate between the main routes that led to the downtown construction sites, the sites themselves, the Ministry of Labour in the centre of Dubai, and the labour camps. Migrant workers suddenly became visible to the wider population and NGOs. On the other hand, in the wake of these strikes and facing concerns by construction companies in particular, the UAE government began to tolerate strikes in the private spaces of the labour camps, rather than in downtown areas. In fact, the government used the camps as sites of mediation over pay and working conditions, so as to avoid more public forms of protests. Indeed, the labour camps proved fertile ground for co-opting labour leaders by paying them off and containing the strikes. The segregation of urban space therefore led to the containment of workers’ political protests (Buckley 2013), while Dubai has continued to expand on the backs of migrant workers.
