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E-mail a friendYOUNG VOICES
Harsh Reality for Dubai Workers
I was riding down a freeway in Dubai when I saw a vehicle that didn't blend into the background of shiny new cars on the road. Amid the Lexus, Mercedes and BMW vehicles that were carrying their drivers to work, was a rickety bus packed with men in blue construction suits.
It's a harsh reality in Dubai. The desert sheikhdom is made up of a population that is 20% Emirati and 80% foreigners, most of whom are expatriates from South Asia.
People come to Dubai to work. But the gleaming city of skyscrapers, man-made islands and swank hotels has arguably been built on the backs of a foreign underclass of workers, many of whom are living and working in some pretty severe conditions.
Recent reports from The Independent and BBC Panorama did not hesitate to go beyond the UAE public relations machine and report on the lives of the Dubai underclass.
So I would be remiss if I went on a trip to Dubai without also exploring the peculiar thing that I saw on the freeway.
I talked to an award-winning UAE-based charity called Helping Hands UAE, which offers support to homeless and abandoned expat workers, as well as blue-collar and white-collar workers. The latter group has been in need of help ever since the global economic crisis.
The co-founder of the 2½ year-old charity told me that the working conditions for their most consistent clients - the male blue-collar workers who live in labor camps - consist of 14-hour workdays, low pay, high debt and few breaks between Noon and 3 p.m., the hottest part of the day.
“Conditions vary from company to company, and there is as yet no minimum wage,” says Helping Hands UAE co-founder Elle Trow. “The reason that the men worked 7 days a week was that they had huge loans to pay off because they had to pay agents in their home countries to get jobs here.”
Trow says that the workers typically entered into the loans “on the promise of high paid wages per month, which never materialized.”
The companies bus the men to and from work every day from the camps where they live. So Helping Hands visits the men at the camps and provides them with food and medical consultation from a team of doctors.
The group has had some success in a short time too. Some companies have made changes to their pay and work conditions after Helping Hands UAE visited and spoke to them about their policies. The group emphasizes that it looks to raise awareness in a “gentle but positive way.”
The charity says that it “urgently needs dedicated warehousing for the day-to-day sorting, checking and preparing the donations and making them ready for distribution.”
Trow says that her organization has been invited to open branches in Abu Dhabi, Qatar and Kuwait, adding that the problems are not unique to Dubai, but are found throughout the Gulf region.