Dubai (4)

This also has been reported on before... The situation of the immigrant workers from India, Bangladesh and Pakistan who account for about 60 - 70% of the population in Dubai and who are working mainly in construction and are ultimately the backbone of the construction boom in Dubai... But I had to see for myself again, specially since some of the reports I have read have been quite negative about the poor working and housing conditions of these workers...

I met - let‘s call him Max - at the base of the Burj Khalifa and talked to him... He has been in Dubai for almost two years now, works in 12 hour shifts (day or night), hails from India (Bangalore) where he has a family and gets about 1.000 Dirham per month (the equivalent of 200 Euro per month), most of which he sends home as he lives quite modestly in a workers' compound outside of Dubai... from the other conversations I had, his situation is fairly typical of the workers here... maybe worryingly, his pay has been delayed more and more... usually he gets paid one month in arrears, lately this has been more like 50 days... a sign that the debt crisis has reached Dubai or a means to squeeze out more from these workers?

The next morning, Thomas and I went to one of the „labour camps“ (compound housings in the suburbs of Dubai) called Sonapur... a vast compound of housing blocks where these immigrant workers live... We have been walking around quite a bit and were also getting access to some of the flats: simple, crowded, often housing four to six people in one room, a TV, some cooking appliances, but clean if somewhat cluttered due to the lack of space... some of the workers there have been in Dubai for eight to ten years in the same set up... but overall quite „humane“ living conditions...

Don‘t get me wrong, there are no traces of „spätrömische Dekadenz“ (the decadence of the late stage of the Roman empire) and these people work very hard for little money but overall their situation is probably better in Dubai than it would be in rural India, Pakistan or Bangladesh... and I am not so sure whether the working and living conditions of, say, Polish construction workers in Germany or Great Britain or maghreb immigrants in France are that much better...

It is just in such a stark contrast to the glitzy world of the oversized shopping malls, hotels, towers and apartment blocks that these workers are building and - once completed - never enter again...

But more about that „world“ soon...