February 9, 2008

Dubai's rags-to-riches miracle built on the toil of exploited foreign workers

Eric Ellis, Dubai


LAST Saturday in the Arabian emirate of Dubai, the great and good of the Australian Football League slapped the backs of expatriates and home-grown potentates in a dollar-drenched celebration of all things Australian, Dubaian and corporate.

Collingwood and Adelaide opened the 2008 football season in an exhibition match as Emirates Airlines-sponsored hucksters such as Eddie McGuire gushed about the soaring ambition of this glistening sheikdom, as if its business-friendly monarchy has somehow reinvented capitalism in transforming Dubai from a Bedouin backwater to a global metropolis.

Dubai and its neighbouring Gulf emirates have posted economic growth in recent years that would embarrass China, but what wasn't mentioned during OzFest is the invisible worker army whose endless toil is so essential to Dubai's massive boom, not least turning a polo ground into an unlikely venue for Aussie rules sur-les-sands.

They mostly live in a slum called Sonapur, hidden in the dunes between Dubai and Sharjah. Without Sonapur, Dubai's architectural bling, its spas and tax-free splendour likely wouldn't exist. It is a Middle Eastern Soweto, where as many as 500,000 foreign labourers, mostly illiterates from the impoverished rural villages of the sub-continent, who build Dubai are housed in some of the most depressing conditions I've seen. It is a Hogarthian dystopia that should shame Dubaians, if they knew much about it. Or cared.

Sonapur is one of the biggest communities in the booming United Arab Emirates but it doesn't seem to officially exist. It isn't found on official maps, road signs or even Wikipedia. Its wretched sprawl of countless filthy dormitories is concealed in desert dunes, an anonymous slum hidden from the Dubaians whose apartments its residents built. The best way to find Sonapur is to follow one of the myriad worker buses that shuttle between the many building sites. Some 90 minutes later you'll be deposited in a heaving sandswept plain of utilitarian four-storey dormitories sprawled as far as the eye can see, punctuated by the occasional store selling ghee, naan and curry powders. Dubai gleams with world-class infrastructure but Sonapur didn't get much of it. Many of its roads are gravel and sand with few footpaths. Open sewers are common. There's none of the grass Dubai's luxury developments specialise in claiming from the desert. The United Arab Emirates is strictly Islamic, and Sonapur's few places of worship for Hindus and Buddhists tend to be makeshift.

Dubai's economy expanded by 35 per cent in 2006, and about 20 per cent last year. It's impressive but it's not oil - that ran out decades ago. Dubai's rags-to-riches miracle relies on an ages-old business plan; slave labour - the millions of impoverished Sri Lankans, Indians, Pakistanis, Filipinos and Africans working up to 80 hour-plus weeks who have built this gleaming oasis. With their passports seized as insurance, these bonded workers toil in near year-round 45-50 degree heat for about $US8 ($9) a day.

It's almost as if Dubai's employers have scanned the latest global wealth survey and zeroed in on the poorest 20 nations to staff their projects. Promised riches but paid salaries well below the OECD poverty line, they have been found jobs here by unscrupulous middlemen charitably described as "employment agencies" who wouldn't have been out of place in 1780s Atlanta.

Boosters argue the emirate is correcting the world's economic imbalance, that the US was also built on immigrant labour. But no country relies more on foreign labour than the emirates, nor is any nation's citizens more outnumbered by outsiders. Of the near 5 million people who officially live in the United Arab Emirates, 80-85 per cent come from somewhere else. The few Emirati one casually meets in Dubai tend to be airport officials processing your passport on the way in, or boozing in the alcohol-relaxed emirate's many bars. State-owned Emirates Airlines - Collingwood's sponsor - is a formidable competitor for Qantas. But as Qantas's chief, Geoff Dixon, points out, it is easier to be mightily profitable in Dubai, with Emirates' new planes soon to pull up at the world's biggest airport now under construction, than in Australia, when one of Emirates' management's - and the airport's - lowest overheads is labour, and where workers don't strike for fear of being shipped back home.

There is much else that is otherworldly about Dubai, which seems to have taken a mortgage on the term "world's biggest". Dubai is building the world's biggest hotel, its biggest airport, shopping mall, artificial island and marina. There's that bizarre development called "the World", where the rich and gauche pay $20 million and more for man-made islands arranged in a phony archipelago mapped like the globe; an indoor ski resort generating its own micro-climate that appals environmentalists.

The Burj Dubai is another anything-is-possible phenomenon. Owned, like many things here, by the reclusive royal family, at 600 metres it is the world's tallest building and seems destined to be mankind's first kilometre-high tower. What isn't much mentioned is that the building is riven with industrial strife, where workers - many billeted at Sonapur - have revolted after being denied breaks and even the relief of water from the searing sun, lest they be sacked and sent home, at their expense. Some workers have died, statistics you don't much read about, in what passes for the local press.

Emaar, the Burj's royal family-owned developer, refuses to comment.

I visited Akbar at his filthy dormitory in Sonapur. He is a 26-year-old Afghan and has been working on a Dubai construction site since 2003, after he had given $2500 rustled from relatives to a labour broker in Kabul. That got him to Dubai, where he was promised he would make that back in a month, and be able to send some home to his impoverished family.

Akbar says he clears about $10 a day for a six-day week, sharing a putrid room with 10 men who sleep in shifts, alternating rest on five bunk beds and the floor.

Sleep can be difficult. The dorm lights are on 24/7, and shift changes and prayer means there is a constant hubbub of activity; someone cooking or dressing, mobiles chirruping. The bus station outside his window processes workers for the hour trip each-way to job sites.

In a scalding recent paper called Building Towers, Cheating Workers, Human Rights Watch demanded the emirates "end abusive labour practices", describing working conditions in Dubai as "less than human".

Just 140 labour inspectors monitor 4 million workers.

"In most other places, a worker faced with hazardous working conditions and unpaid wages, in a free market economy that has an extreme shortage of labour, would move to a different job," Human Rights Watch said.

"But this is not an option for the migrant construction workers of the UAE, who like all other migrant workers in the country are contracted to work only for a specific employer.

"A worker seeking to move to a different employer is eligible to do so only after working for two years for the present."

Dubai is also been a big winner from the September 11 attacks. As oil hovers at about $US100 a barrel, Arab petrodollars are speculatively parked here, because their owners sometimes feel discriminated against when they travel to the West. The US remembers that 15 of the 19 hijackers on September 11 were Saudi, and the plot was financed with money washed through Dubai.

The emirates' sovereign wealth funds have also emerged as some of the world's most aggressive buyers of prime Western assets in recent years; ports, marquee property and infrastructure.

As the working poor of Sonapur lament, democracy and workers' rights are not high on the national priority list. Not that the untaxed Emiratis seem to much notice, as they count their money and invest in soaring towers of speculation, which seem to defy economic gravity as well as nature.