Labor unrest in the UAE is continuing to attract international attention. Recall that this is a country where only one third of the residents are citizens, and where the two-thirds majority depend on a "citizen" sponsor to retain their jobs. Most of that rights-less majority work for little pay and in poor conditions to construct the gleaming skyscrapers of the magic kingdom:
On the outskirts of the city, where the desert begins, are the concrete barracks where the workers live, thousand upon thousand of them.
Dubai is being built virtually from scratch - 20 years ago few of these gleaming towers existed - and the men building it are migrants from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal. They work for about $5 a day, sleep four or five to a room, and see their families once every two or three years because it's hard to raise the money to pay for a trip home...
"Many of the workers suffer great stress and depression," says KV Shamsudeen, an Indian businessman, who has set up a charitable trust on their behalf. He says many of the workers have to take out loans in order to pay an agent in their home country to find them a job, even though this type of commission is illegal...
There's little that workers in the United Arab Emirates can do to improve their lot. Strikes are illegal, although there have been several recently. And because there is no right of association, there are no trade unions. So when, for example, pay is late, there is little the men can do about it. The lack of redress also means that smaller grievances - like having to wait an hour at the end of the day to clock off - can suddenly boil over into violence.
However things look as though they might be about to change. The UAE government is sensitive to criticism. In 2004, for example, it ordered a magazine to withdraw from circulation an edition in which it had published information on the number of men killed on construction sites...
The government has now responded by saying that a new labour law being drawn up will allow workers to organise. Current plans, according to the minister of labour, envisage a single union with separate representatives for different industries. The minister has said he expects the proposed law to be in place by the end of the year.
Let's see if the labor minister remains true to his word.
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