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Foreign Workers Begin to Protest in UAE¹

November 2005

The Al Hamed construction labor camp is a hardscrabble jumble of battered trailers, where 7,800 laborers sleep, cook meals, and kneel to pray in an outdoor pavilion of corrugated tin. The camp lies on Dubai's desert outskirts, out of view of the wealthy foreigners in the Gulf shore skyscrapers and the tourists thronging to mall boutiques like Prada and Gucci.

The workers in this camp, however, know the city's luxurious attractions. They built them, on salaries that range from $135 to $400 a month. Despite their paltry wages, and despite the tens of billions of dollars in oil revenues pouring into the United Arab Emirates, laborers sometimes have trouble coaxing their employers to pay up. Three to five months without pay is common. Some say they have not seen salaries in a year or longer.

In the past, the docile immigrant work force had little redress. But this year, thousands have walked off construction sites, blocking roads, marching in protest to the Labor Ministry or simply refusing to work.

A dozen laborers filed grievances last month for as much as six months' back pay. The protests have galvanized the federal Labor Ministry into cracking down on the offending companies, saying they are tarnishing the reputation of the country as it negotiates a free trade agreement with the U.S. Workers' rights are a critical factor in those talks.

By the Labor Ministry's count, unpaid workers have organized 18 strikes this year, involving more than 10,000 protesters. Most were in Dubai, the wealthiest of the country's seven emirates.

Labor Undersecretary Khalid Alkhazraji promised to name offending companies and their owners, an unprecedented step because royal family members who own companies could be painted in an unfavorable light. Three companies have been named publicly — none with openly royal connections.

This week, the ministry announced a hot line for laborers to report unpaid wages.

Nearly a million migrants from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, China and elsewhere have poured into this desert sheikdom to provide the low-wage muscle behind one of the world's great building booms.

Almost 98 percent of private-sector workers in the Emirates are foreigners, mostly men, who make up more than 80 percent of the country's 4 million inhabitants.

In most Gulf Arab states, the situation is similar. In Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, Bahrain and the Emirates, lawyers say it has become customary for contractors to withhold migrants' passports and three or more months of wages to keep them from leaving.

Human Rights Watch and the US State Department have criticized the Gulf countries as centers of human trafficking. In Saudi Arabia, Human Rights Watch said in 2004 that some Asian migrants worked in "slavery-like conditions." The Emirates has a big impetus to treat its workers better. The free trade pact it is negotiating with the U.S. stands to make this business-savvy country even more wealthy.

Holding up the deal are U.S. demands that would give workers the right to form unions and bargain collectively.

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¹ Kraine, Jim. Adapted from "Foreign workers begin to protest:Accord with U.S. forcing Emirates to address labor abuse, exploitation." Associated Press.