NEWSWEEK: What is the makeup of the labor force in the U.A.E.? Sarah Leah Whitson: The overwhelming majority of workers in the U.A.E. are imported—90 percent of the country’s workforce is made up of foreign workers. The vast majority of those are construction workers and domestic workers, who are working at the lowest wages. These workers can make between $100 and $200 a month.
How does that compare with salaries for local workers? The U.A.E. has one of the world’s highest per capita earnings averages, higher than the U.S. Dubai and other places in the U.A.E. are also among the most expensive places in the world to live. The cost of living there is roughly akin to a western European city. Hotel rooms are $200 to $300 a night. A cup of coffee is $3 or $4. It’s a very expensive place to live, so the wages that these people are being paid are not enough to subsist on, if it weren’t for the fact that construction and domestic workers have their housing and food, by and large, paid for by the employer.
Where are most of these foreign workers coming from? The Philippines, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, India are probably the four biggest suppliers of labor. They are drawn to Gulf countries because they make more than what they are going to make in their own country, where they could be earning $1 a day, so in a sense, it’s still more than they were earning in the desperate poverty of Sri Lanka or India. They still find themselves better off. However that doesn’t give the U.A.E. an excuse to pay them such abusive wages. There is a minimum-wage law in the U.A.E., but the government has never implemented it.
Do the workers send money home? Theoretically foreign workers remit some money home but in fact construction workers typically borrow money or sell off whatever assets their families may have to pay recruiting agents two, three or sometimes four thousand dollars in order to obtain employment in the U.A.E. This fee covers their travel, their visa and the recruiting agent’s fees.
Who are these recruiting agents? The recruiting agents are typically companies in the worker’s home country that are affiliated with recruiting agents in the U.A.E. U.A.E. law outlaws the payment of recruiting fees by workers. It says that the employers are supposed to pay these fees, and for travel, and government permits and visas, but they don’t. They avoid all that by having these recruiting agents, in the Philippines, for example, charge these monies, so it’s sort of untraceable.
Are you concerned about the conditions laborers work under? Yes, particularly for construction workers. Obviously they are working in extreme high temperatures for most of the year, on high-rise buildings that we don’t believe are particularly secure or safe. When you look at the number of people who die each year at these construction sites, it’s really a cause for concern, particularly when you compare that to the number that the government officially records as having died. For example, in 2004, the foreign embassies reported about 850 construction-worker deaths, whereas the only state in U.A.E. that kept these statistics was Dubai, where they only reported 34 such deaths. And if you look at the death certificates, the cause of death is typically listed as heart disease. It’s a global statistical anomaly that 35-year-old South Asian men are dropping dead of heart attacks in the U.A.E. in levels unseen historically or anywhere else in the world. It’s a joke.
What about conditions for other workers? Employers typically, as a matter of practice, withhold wages. If you ask any employer, they’ll tell you that they all withhold two months’ wages as a sort of security deposit. So, before someone even starts working they are in arrears on their debt because they can’t make the first two months’ payments that they owe. Employers basically know that if they don’t pay wages for the first six months nobody can do anything, and for them, it’s an easy form of financing.
They also routinely withhold passports. This acts as a sort of security deposit to prevent the workers from fleeing. We have so many cases of people where, a family member in their home country dies, they can’t get to their employer because it’s a weekend, so they can’t leave the country, and can’t participate in important events. They’re basically trapped. They can’t leave.
Is there a path to citizenship for these workers? The U.A.E. technically refers to all its migrant workers as guest workers. There is no ability to become citizens. And 80 percent of the population is made up of foreign workers, so it’s a sensitive issue for them.
What would you like Western organizations like the Guggenheim and the Louvre to do? We want them to publicly commit that they won’t do these things. We want the U.A.E. government to enforce its own laws and put bad employers in jail or close them down or penalize them in a way that matters.
What we see is Western companies going into the U.A.E., taking advantage of the extremely cheap labor in order to make tremendous profits. We are telling these companies—especially the nonprofit organizations, which hold themselves out as acting in the benefit of the world and society—to promise that they are not going to do these bad things. We want the Guggenheim to say “you know what, for anyone who works for the Guggenheim, or a Guggenheim sub contractor, they are not going to get their passports withheld, they are going to get their wages paid, and they are not going to pay recruiting fees.” We want them to be role models. We want them to treat their workers in the U.A.E. no differently than they would treat them in France or the U.S.
