City of Gold: Dubai and the Dream of Capitalism (34 page)

Mathew shows pictures of Bhawarlal’s family in Rajasthan, India. Here is his wife, grandmother, and mother, each with a sad face, sitting in colorful saris in front of a concrete shack in a dirt yard. Bhawarlal’s teen son stands to the side, in shirt and trousers. Since his father stopped sending checks, the boy has left school to work.

The family is too poor to provide the constant care he’ll need for the rest of his life. Mathew says it’s worthwhile to send him home, if there is money for support. A family’s affection sometimes brings a person out of a coma. But Sun Engineering hasn’t given a thing to its shattered mason or his family.

“They’ve got no more remittance, no more support,” Mathew says.

“The company refuses to pay anything?” I ask.

“There is no law,” Mathew explains. “No one can force them to pay a dirham.”

So he’s stuck in the neurology ward. Sun Engineering’s personnel manager, T. V. Ismayil, told me that Sun has made no disability payment to the family to compensate the loss of its breadwinner. Ismayil says there is a limit to what the company can provide. He would agree to pay $6,000 for treatment in India, but he feels Bhawarlal is better off in Dubai, where the company’s medical insurance covers his treatment. “We cannot pay his wife or son. We don’t know who his legal heir is,” Ismayil
says. “The company cannot take responsibility for a family for their whole lives.”

Mathew says he’s been reduced to visiting the grimy Sun Engineering labor camp in Sonapur to collect donations from Bhawarlal’s co-workers, among the most impoverished men in Dubai.

Construction work is dangerous. Especially in Dubai. The city has six thousand building sites and just sixteen inspectors.
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That leaves safety precautions up to individual companies. Standards range from sensible to negligent, reflecting the practices of contractors’ home countries.

Hundreds of workers die on the job each year, but the exact numbers are unclear. In 2004,
Construction Week
magazine reported 880 workers died in the UAE, most of them in Dubai.
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The Dubai government reported just thirty-four site deaths that year.
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A construction safety trainer told me that some eight hundred workers fell to their deaths in the UAE in 2007, more than twice as many as in the United States. He described falls as the city’s chief on-the-job killer. Sixty percent of the UAE’s falling deaths happen despite victims wearing safety harnesses. The laborers perish while dangling from a rope. The safety expert, who asked that his name not be used, says Dubai’s rescue services aren’t skilled or quick enough to reach the dangling men before they die from what is called suspension trauma. Blood pools in their legs and keeps oxygen from reaching the brain. They lose consciousness, and they’re dead in under an hour. It’s the condition that killed Jesus on the cross.

The lack of training extends to the laborers themselves. The men erecting skyscrapers tend to come from farming villages in India’s poorest corners, places where the chief pursuits are raising goats and rice. “The sad fact here is that workers are expendable,” the expert said. “These are really unskilled guys and they get into really stupid accidents.”

Another problem for Indian laborers is kidney failure. Working in the Dubai heat is punishing enough, but workers don’t drink enough water. Their kidneys bear the consequences. Mathew cites a survey of Gulf returnees to his home state of Kerala that says 70 percent come home with kidney problems. Kidney failure is especially frequent among skyscraper
crews, because toilets are far away on the ground level. Those toiling on the upper stories don’t want to take time to go all the way down to urinate, so they don’t drink enough.

The AM radio show is called
Lifeline
. The host is fast-talking K.V. Shamsudheen, a sixty-one-year-old investment manager, who speaks in a blur of South Indian Malayalam peppered with English. Shamsudheen’s studio guest today is yet another Indian immigrant in trouble. The man says he and his wife are grappling with $35,000 in debt on a combined income of $2,300 a month.

“He has six credit cards! His wife has seven! They’re not going to be in a position to repay this—ever,” Shamsudheen says.

The man appeals for kind souls in Radioland to help him repay his debts and keep him from the Dubai jail. Then Shamsudheen hands his countryman a pair of scissors. Still on the air, the debtor slices each of his credit cards in half and promises to buy only with cash.

This is talk radio, Dubai style.

Shamsudheen is a small man with gold-rimmed glasses and neat hair. His smile is persistent, his manner precise. He’s a campaigner against debt, especially the predatory lending he holds responsible for sending so many Indians to the Dubai jail. More than 40 percent of Dubai’s prisoners are debtors.
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Dubai’s economic boom has enriched huge numbers of Indians, but not those in the lower echelons. Many have also seen their financial status fall over the past decade. Shamsudheen blames the ease with which one could borrow money and get credit cards. He uses his broadcasts to extol his micro-savings plans, telling workers to set aside 50 dirhams—$14—a month and invest it in Indian mutual funds available from his investment company.

The debt trap starts in India, where, as mentioned earlier, recruiting agents charge up to $4,000 to place men in Dubai jobs. The agents often exaggerate the salary, which encourages emigrants to borrow their recruiting fees from usurious lenders. Once they arrive in Dubai, reality sets in. They’re locked in debt bondage at half the salary they expected.

“They’ve taken a loan that’s growing daily,” Shamsudheen says.

“They can’t go back to India. They can’t repay the loan. They can’t even pay a substantial amount.”

Low-paid workers without company housing pack themselves into plywood cubicles inside illegally subdivided homes. In August 2008, a fire broke out in one of these houses in Deira. Authorities sorting through the wreckage found at least five hundred men living in a house built for a single family. It was a warren of makeshift rooms, each of which housed as many as twenty-five men. Firemen pulled eleven corpses from the smoking ruin, those of a Bangladeshi and ten Indians. Afterward, the Dubai government banned multiple families from sharing houses, and inspectors chased “bachelors” from homes across the city.

By the time the economic boom petered out at the end of 2008, Dubai was becoming untenable for anyone who wasn’t rich. For many, the one-house, one-family law made it impossible to stay. A typical one-bedroom apartment rented for $1,400 per month. That’s an outrageous amount in a city where the minimum monthly salary is just over $100.

Shamsudheen advises Indians to go home. It’s easy to get $150-a-month jobs in India now. Housing is cheaper, the standard of living better for a low-wage worker. “Why come here? Before you leave India, think about it. Make sure you get a better income.”

Migrant workers have formed a majority of the UAE population since the 1960s. After the country hit oil, the thriving economy allowed citizens to coast into high-pay, low-effort government jobs, while hiring immigrants to do just about everything else.

Emiratis have since seen their numbers diluted in a sea of migrants. The foreign workforce now scares people. Emiratis worry that laborers will organize unions and make political demands, even form terror cells. Construction laborers since 2005 have held dozens of short strikes over unpaid wages or bad living conditions. As noted earlier, in November 2007, a strike by forty thousand construction workers halted work for more than a week at the city’s most prestigious sites, including the new airport terminal and the Burj Dubai.

The strikes led Dubai Police Chief Dhahi Khalfan and others to describe migrant workers as a national security threat. In 2008, the UAE
began mulling over a six-year visa limit that would help it control the country’s demographic makeup. The law would reduce the dominance of Indians while forcing a rotation in the workforce to prevent immigrants from settling long-term or organizing political groups.

All this has damaged Indians’ once-close relations with their Emirati hosts. Indians’ status has slipped since the death of Sheikh Rashid, who openly courted Indian traders, seeking their advice and friendship. The archives of Pakistani photographer Noor Ali Rashid show Sheikh Rashid, Sheikh Maktoum, and other royals visiting homes of prominent Indians to wish them well on the Hindu festival of Diwali. That tradition has ended, the goodwill evaporated. Sheikh Mohammed seems keen to court expatriate Arabs, and these newcomers now lord it over longtime Indians in Dubai’s stratified society.

Indians’ contributions aren’t recognized. Workers’ rights and welfare are ignored, says Venu Rajamony, the Indian consul in Dubai.

Rajamony rejects suggestions that the labor strikes have anything to do with political demands. The UAE could halt them by instituting a decent minimum wage rather than the market minimum of just over $100 a month, or about 55 U.S. cents an hour. Rajamony says it should be around $300, the minimum monthly salary the Indian government has set for its housemaids working in the UAE.

“Workers deserve a much better deal. Whenever there is cost cutting, what is sacrificed is wages of workers and their welfare,” Rajamony says. “Allowance is always given to rises in the price of steel and cement. The wages of the labor force is probably the smallest component of the overall bill of any contractor or developer. Wages can be easily increased without too much burden.”

Dubai’s leadership has been deeply embarrassed by the coverage of its labor camps and working conditions. Among the city’s policy makers there is recognition that government has failed to come up with a workable policy on labor, but no one will discuss it openly. Sheikh Mohammed is said to be concerned about laborers’ well-being, but he and his advisory team are averse to bad publicity. They don’t address the problem because they don’t want to be seen as responding to outside pressure.

At one point, Sheikh Mohammed was going to tour labor camps and
publicly thank migrants for their role in building Dubai. But the boss’s advisers feared the gesture would backfire in the press. In 2006, the American news show
20/20
skewered Sheikh Mohammed for treating his horses better than the workers building his city. The criticism stung. Negative coverage also damages Dubai’s reputation as a tourist destination, thereby taking a direct toll on the economy. So the Dubai leadership decided to proceed carefully, by making improvements first.

Wages haven’t budged, but conditions in many camps have been upgraded. Dubai is building a slew of labor hostels on its southwest side, near the new airport. The Labor Ministry is forcing companies to pay salaries electronically, and workers are beginning to withdraw funds with ATM cards. Health insurance will soon be mandatory. For the past few years, outdoor work in the searing July and August afternoons has been banned, although many companies disregard those restrictions.
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The Labor Ministry has also banned—but not effectively halted—the standard practice of withholding passports, which holds workers in virtual bondage.

But labor policy remains a muddle. Officially, the Labor Ministry takes the lead. But other ministries also get involved, as does the Dubai government. The parties don’t agree. In 2008 Sheikh Mohammed replaced the labor minister in his cabinet reshuffle.

U.S. and EU free trade negotiators have pressed the UAE to bring its labor laws up to international standards and drop its ban on trade unions. And New York-based Human Rights Watch issued several damning reports on labor conditions in the UAE. Its 2006 report “Building Towers, Cheating Workers” described labor conditions as verging on slavery. “The UAE has abdicated almost entirely from its responsibility to protect workers’ rights,” the report said. There was no serious response in the report from the UAE or Dubai authorities.

The head of Human Rights Watch’s Middle East reporting, Sarah Leah Whitson, lambasted the government in a public press conference in a Dubai hotel. Still Dubai authorities said nothing, although federal officials responded by describing the improvements mentioned above. Inside the Dubai government, however, the report divided those who said Dubai should meet with Human Rights Watch and lay out its improvement plans and those who said it should not. The rights group made it clear that its report would be balanced if it contained Dubai’s response. Again Sheikh Mohammed’s advisers decided not to talk. It was seen as bowing to foreign pressure. The issue continues to fester.

SEX AND SLAVERY