Paradise for some, mirage for others in the Gulf
By Haro Chakmakjian
DUBAI (AFP): While most expats from the West live a life of luxury in the oil-rich Gulf, Asian workers often see their dream of escape from poverty back home turn into a mirage in the desert.
"It's like a jail here for us, hard work morning, afternoon and night," said Sri Lankan house maid Lena, who has worked in the Gulf for 12 years leaving behind a daughter who is now 20.
But Lena and husband Anil, a carpenter in Dubai, can count themselves lucky: they have been paid their full dues and saved enough to build a house and open a shop in their homeland.
Cases of unpaid wages, bogus visa trading by unscrupulous recruitment agents, squalid accommodation, unpaid overtime and lax safety standards are common in the Gulf, the workplace of millions of Asians.
"It's still the expat dream, whether they come from Asia or the poorer Arab countries, to work in the Gulf, a kind of 'promised land,'" said Abu Bakr Badawi of the International Labor Organization (ILO).
"Where they come from is even worse," said Badawi, the ILO office director in Kuwait who told AFP that his job was "to assist governments and try to improve working conditions rather than enforce a police style of action".
On the outskirts of Dubai and out of sight, men at Al-Qusais camp regain some dignity on Friday afternoons, their only free time in a grinding week in the wretched heat and humidity of summer in the Gulf.
They wash, visit the barber's, write letters, phone home, sip tea or play a game of cricket on the sand.
Azam Khan, a 32-year-old electrician from Bihar, India who makes 780 dirhams (US$210) a month, prefers to just sleep off the exertions of the week.
"Life is not good, not bad," he said after emerging at dusk from a spartan but air-conditioned room shared with several other workers under a corrugated metal roof.
Without a woman or child in sight at the camp, since Emirati immigration laws lay down a minimum salary of $820 plus accommodation for workers to bring their families, Khan said loneliness and boredom were part of that life.
Suicides and fatal accidents at work are often reported in Gulf newspapers.
In stark contrast, many European and American expatriate families in the Westernized boomtown of Dubai live in luxury villas with annual rents of $27,000 or more paid by their companies.
On top of income tax-free salaries, private swimming pools, beach clubs, cars and desert safaris also compensate for living away from home.
"We used to scrimp and save every year to be able to afford to go on summer holidays. But life here is easy," a British woman teacher told a friend visiting from England over coffee in the upmarket district of Jumeira.
Not counting several long-established trading families from India, the hundreds of thousands of unskilled or semi-skilled Asian workers in Dubai have little time to enjoy the Gulf's leisure and tourism hub.
Indian office cleaner Morgesh from a village near Madras, lured by overtime pay, takes one day off a month to make 175 dollars working 14-hour days. "Every six months or so, I go to the beach or the souk (market), maybe," he said.
In 1992, he paid a recruitment agent in India more than $800 to secure the job.
The worst fate is that of the cheap manpower from the Indian subcontinent that fuels the construction boom in Dubai, home of the sail-shaped Burj al-Arab, the world's tallest hotel.
"They develop health problems later in life from toiling in temperatures of more than 40 degrees (Celsius, 104 Fahrenheit)," said an Arab civil engineer at a skyscraper site where work goes on day and night.
Asian diplomats, whose economies need the workers' remittances, pointed to improvements such as a Dubai ban imposed in April on workers being transported in cattle-trucks and a bank guarantee scheme to curb cases of unpaid wages.
"They get a good amount of money compared to back home, they are happy from that point of view," a senior diplomat in Dubai said.
But Indonesia, in a move taken in the past by other Asian countries with workers in the Gulf, this month suspended the export of laborers to Saudi Arabia to press for better protection of its nationals.
A cruel but telling joke doing the rounds in Dubai goes: "On his death, an Indian is given the choice between heaven and hell. 'Can't I go to Dubai?' he asks."