ABSTRACT
On Saadiyat, and throughout the gleaming city-scapes of Abu Dhabi and Dubai, the construction workforce is almost entirely made up of Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi Sri Lankan and Nepalese migrant laborers. Bound to an employer by the kafala sponsorship system, they arrive heavily indebted from recruitment and transit fees, only to find that their gulf dream has been a mirage. In its 2006 report “Building Towers, Cheating Workers,” Human Rights Watch issued the first of its several critiques of the kafala system. Gulf Labor has led an international boycott of the museum’s Abu Dhabi branch by more than 1,800 artists, writers, curators and gallery owners—many of them respected names whose work the Guggenheim would like to acquire for its Saadiyat collection. A Gulf Labor offshoot occupied the Guggenheim Museum in New York, protesting labor conditions in Abu Dhabi. In response, the museum’s director, Richard Armstrong, claimed that the Guggenheim’s Abu Dhabi expansion, designed by Mr. Gehry, is not yet under construction.
