Dear Frank,
I thoroughly enjoyed your recent article on Dubai, as I did too yourself and James Nix's Chaos at the Crossroads, which I winced my way through some months back. Whatever about the subjective merits of Dubai's aesthetic qualities, you are to be congratulated for highlighting, to your readers in Ireland, the miserly wages handed out to the expatriate labourers who put its buildings in place. While the average salary figures of 150-200 Euro a month you give are obviously quite low, those at the lower end of the scale are obviously earning quite a bit less.
I get the impression that the plight of the legions of underpaid workers in the petroleum-rich Gulf States is a sorry state of affairs that goes unreported in the Western media. This, I reckon, is for a number of reasons: the lack of civil institutions in the GCC countries who compile statistics on the expatriate workers; the apparent unwillingness of the Gulf countries themselves to divulge the conditions of said workers; the fact that there are so many other horrors in the Middle Eastern region at large that merit journalistic attention, be they in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, or the Levant, that the difficulties of workers lucky enough to have a job pales in comparison to the lot of people an hour and a half flight to the north who are subject to the horrors of increasingly brutal armed conflict (not to speak of the jobless multitudes the army of expat workers leave behind in the Subcontinent and South-East Asia); and finally but not in isolation from the third reason speculated, the fact that the six GCC countries are key allies in the US's War on Terror, that the Western media is unwilling to rock those particular diplomatic relations boats lest they upset a few airbase aplenty Sheikhs. I accept I might be being too cynical in my last reason given.
Evidence abounds, both hearsay and documented, of foreign labour abuse and exploitation. A Sri Lankan taxi-driver told a colleague of mine (I have been working as a teacher in Qatar since last August) about one such incident of degradation. The driver's previous employment had been as a labourer with a construction firm. One day at work, after an eight-hour stretch on the job, himself and a co-worker went on their lunch break. Unluckily for them, their hard-earned break coincided with a site visit from an Egyptian engineer of the Qatari construction business. Apparently, such construction firms like their projects to finish way ahead of schedule, and the engineer was eager to do his employer's bidding. He confronted the two Sri Lankans about their slackness, and when they protested that they had been working since 4.00am, daring to suggest perhaps that even blue-overalled Gulf-based South Asians should be entitled to a lunch break, what did our Egyptian do, but hock back and spit in the lunches of the two men. Naturally enough, in my view anyway, the provoked labourer reacted by grabbing the nearest rod of metal and striking his overseer across the shoulder with it. Following this incident, the engineer went to his Qatari sponsor, claiming that he had been the victim of an unprovoked attack by one of the workers. The Sri Lankan had the initiative to approach the same sponsor off his own back before they came for him and gave his own version of events. Fortunately for him, the sponsor was horrified when he heard of his mistreatment, and had him transferred to work for another construction company. No compensation was forthcoming, and I didn't hear if the Egyptian got to keep his job or not.
The local newspapers do sometimes shed light on the injustices heaped upon the foreign guest workers. A few weeks ago I read in the Gulf Times of an Indian construction worker who had arrived in Doha about five months' ago, where he has been working in heights of 30 metres, in temperatures about as hot as the hob of hell you encountered in Dubai a few days ago, constructing one of the many glass towers that are sprouting up in the West Bay area of the city. I can't remember the details of his case, nor how he had made his way into the paper, but one detail I can remember was that one of his complaints against his employers was that in his five months' work he had only been paid 150 Qatari Riyals, in other words, about 30 Euro! When I arrived here last autumn I read the case of a group of Nepali nationals, who were protesting outside their embassy, because they had been promised jobs, by an unscrupulous employment agency, in a multinational supermarket here in Doha, only to be brought on their first day of work to a building site instead, where they would earn a fraction of what they had been promised as shelf-stackers.
Globalization and the Gulf, by John W. Fox, Nada Mourtada-Sabbah and Mohammed al-Mutawa, contains an insightful chapter on labour rights problems in the Gulf states by John Willoughby, in which he explains an all too frequent feature of migrant workers being "cheated" by agents in their home countries, often with the connivance of or a blind eye being turned by a Gulf citizen who must act as a sponsor for any expatriate labour under the region's inflexible labour laws. On a side note, the same book also contains an interesting essay on an area a good deal closer to your own area of expertise, entitled "The evolution of the Gulf city type, oil, and globalization" by Sulayman Khalaf.
Another source of the injustices suffered by the army of Third World workers in my own country of residence is the website Qatar Sucks. Don't be put off by its disingenuous name though. It is a forum where people copy and paste media stories of mistreatment of employees here in Qatar, and contains some fairly shocking, usually saddening, cases. Incidentally, when I tried to comment on one of the stories posted, a message from QTel, Qatar's state-run telecoms monopoly, blocked me from doing so. One more information source of foreign worker hardship, and the local governments' inaction in combating it, is Human Rights Watch's report on the subject, focusing on the UAE, entitled " Building Towers, Cheating Workers."
Finally, and I think you alluded to this in your own article, something must be said about the cities of the region's apparent 'fakeness' for want of a better word, a land where image is absolutely everything, substance nothing. While Dubai opts for architectural behemoths, skiing in the desert and highly luxurious if a bit gimmicky and a tad environmentally-damaging island resorts, Qatar seems to style itself as the sporting capital of the region, a Limerick of the Arabian Gulf you might say. It hosted the Asian Games last year, a regional Olympic-like tournament; its soccer league attracts big name ageing superstars – Batistuta, Romario and Jay-Jay Okocha have all graced its fine, near-empty stadiums; while top-class golf, tennis and motorsport events come here on an annual basis. Due to the fact that many of these events come to Qatar not because of the Qataris insatiable appetite for live sports but rather as a means of marketing the name "Qatar" to the outside world, tickets are often very cheap, if they carry any price at all. In keeping with its identity as the sporting hub of the region, Doha hosted a top-class athletics meeting last Friday night, which I attended. Attending alongside me were scores of blue-collared labourers bussed in from their corrugated-iron-roofed labour camps on the outskirts of the city for a night off. A benevolent gesture on their employers' behalf perhaps? Or, more likely it seems, a stunt pulled by the authorities for fear that international television audiences may witness an almost empty stadium. Image is everything in this corner of the Gulf it would seem.
Again I would like to applaud you for your mention of the immigrant labour hardship you encountered on your Dubai visit. Hopefully with more and more media attention, Western media attention in particular, something can be done to improve the conditions of the Gulf's toiling masses. Perhaps you could have a word with a colleague of yours who writes about labour/human rights issues to maybe do a more in-depth piece on this issue.
Yours sincerely,
James Gaffney,
Old Airport Road,
Doha,
Qatar (via Limerick).
Photos: Richard Messenger (workers), Ahmad Almansoor (skyline)
