[R-G] UAE: Army of Restive Migrant Workers

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

<http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/08/05/news/dubai.php>
Emirates making peace with army of restive migrant workers
By Jason DeParle
Sunday, August 5, 2007

DUBAI: They still wake before dawn in desert dormitories that pack a
dozen men or more to a room. They still pour concrete and tie steel
rods in temperatures that top 43 degrees Celsius. They still spend
years away from their families in India and Pakistan to earn about $1
an hour. They are still bonded to employers under terms that critics
liken to indentured servitude.

But construction workers, a million strong here and famously
mistreated, have gotten the country's attention.

After a season of unprecedented labor unrest, the government is
seeking peace with the army of sweat-stained migrants who make local
citizens a minority in their own country and sustain one of the
world's great building booms. Regulators here have enforced midday sun
breaks, improved health benefits, upgraded living conditions and
cracked down on employers brazen enough to stop paying workers.

The result is a study of halting change in a region synonymous with
foreign labor and, for many years, labor abuse.

Many rich countries, including the United States, rely on cheap
foreign workers. But no country is as dependent as the United Arab
Emirates, where guest workers make up about 85 percent of the
population and 99 percent of the private work force.

Labor agitation came as a surprise in this city of glass towers and
marble-tiled malls where social harmony is part of the marketing plan
and political action can seem all but extinct. But when thousands of
migrant construction workers walked off the job last year, blocking
traffic and smashing parked cars, it became clear that the nonnatives
were restless.

"I'm not saying we don't have a problem," said Ali bin Abdulla
al-Kaabi, the emirates' labor minister, who was appointed by the
ruling sheiks to upgrade standards and restore stability. "There is a
problem. We're working to fix it."

Change here is constrained by rival concerns of the sort that shape
the prospects of workers worldwide. Like many countries, only more so,
the United Arab Emirates needs the foreign laborers but fears their
numbers. The changes under way still leave the workers under close
watch, segregated from the general population, with no right to
unionize and no chance at citizenship.

"We want to protect the minority, which is us," Kaabi said.

Among those buffeted by recent events is Sami Yullah, a 24-year-old
pipe fitter from Pakistan, who arrived four years ago. Like many
workers, he paid nearly a year's salary in illegal recruiter's fees,
despite laws here that require employers to bear all the hiring costs.
In exchange, he was promised a job building sewer systems at a monthly
salary of about $225, nearly twice what he earned at home.

Yullah found the work harder and more hazardous than he had expected.
Two co-workers were killed on the job, he said, and two others
injured, when they fell through a manhole. Conditions at the workers'
camp where he lived, rudimentary at best, disintegrated when his
employer let the water and electricity lapse. Then a problem even more
basic arose: The company stopped paying the workers.

"The owner kept saying, 'Wait a minute, I will get some money,' " said
Yullah, who joined about 400 co-workers last year in walking off the
job. "He was taking advantage of us."

In a break with past practice, Kaabi's Labor Ministry backed the
workers. Tapping a company bank guarantee, it restored the camp
utilities and paid some of the back wages. It barred the company,
Industrial & Engineering Enterprises, from hiring more workers,
leading it to close its emirates operation. And it helped workers like
Yullah, who is still owed nearly six months' back pay, find new jobs.

By global standards, punishing a company that does not pay its workers
may seem modest, but Yullah recognized it as something new.

"The company cheated me," he said. "But the labor office is standing
with the laborers."

The emirates is a rags-to-riches story on a nation-state scale. Until
the discovery of oil in the late 1950s, there was little here but
Bedouins and sand. To extract the oil and build a modern economy, the
rulers imported a multinational labor force that quickly outnumbered
native Arabs.