DESERT FANTASIES - Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism - page 135

time or staggered schedules. I could see them from a distance as small figures hoisting
steel and hammering at the top of improbably high buildings. We had seen them at dusk
the day before, waiting in very dirty overalls for buses to take them to the camps.
While tourists have no idea that the hotels where they are staying were built by men
who are often treated like indentured servants, in the human rights community the issue
has become a cause célèbre.
Dubai and all of the UAE reject international labor regulations, including the Migrant
Workers Convention, and reject any role for the United Nations' International Labour Or-
ganization. Wolfgang Weinz of the ILO's tourism department said that labor unions are
frozen out.
“I have no idea, honestly, what goes on there other than what I read in human rights
reports,” he said, explaining that the ILO cannot work in countries where workers do not
have independent rights. Dubai and Abu Dhabi prohibit freedom of association to cre-
ate a union, and reject international rights of migrant workers, whether male construction
workers or female domestic workers.
Those human rights reports have been scathing. In the seminal investigation Building
Towers, Cheating Workers , Human Rights Watch detailed “wage exploitation, indebted-
ness to unscrupulous recruiters, and working conditions that are hazardous to the point of
being deadly.”
A British report was even harsher, saying “the labour market closely resembles the old
indentured labour system brought to Dubai by its former colonial master, the British.”
Essentially, these investigators describe the working conditions as miserable. Poor fam-
ily men from India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh pay several thousand dollars in
finder's fees to land construction jobs only to discover the pay is nothing as promised. Im-
mediately on arrival at the Dubai airport, the workers have to hand over their passports,
with visas, to their recruitment agents, essentially giving up their rights for the duration of
their two- or three-year contracts. They are bused to the bleak camps to begin construc-
tion work. Often their first two months of pay are withheld until they leave. Their monthly
salary of roughly $175 a month is especially pitiful considering the UAE has a per capita
income of $4,070 a month, which is higher than the annual incomes of average workers
in the men's home countries on the subcontinent.
Construction workers have staged occasional demonstrations in Dubai—shutting down
a major highway in one instance—but to little effect. They are prisoners of the country's
sponsorship system, which applies to all foreign workers. You can only work in the UAE
with the sponsorship of a company. Once you lose your job with that company—and com-
plaining about poor wages or dangerous working conditions means you'll be fired—then
you lose your visa and must leave the country.
The labor camps for these workers are off-limits and so are the construction sites in
Dubai and Abu Dhabi that I tried to visit. So I asked a local investigator to visit the camps