DESERT FANTASIES - Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism - page 136

for me and bring back a report as well as photographs under the terms that he remain an-
onymous.
The camps house not only construction workers but the taxicab drivers that ferry tour-
ists around town. The older barracks-style buildings house eight to sixteen men in a room.
“You can imagine the smell of these construction workers crammed into the room. They
have one small window they don't want to open because they're stuck in the desert, far
away from everything and if they open the window the sand blows in.
“These guys are semiliterate. They're together with only other guys, no women, and
they don't take good care of themselves. Plus they're working all the time. It's crazy,” he
said. “They seem depressed.”
These foreign workers may seem invisible to tourists, but they are essential to creating
and maintaining Destination Dubai, and Abu Dhabi. They not only build the hotels; they
are the menial porters and tea servers, drivers and deliverymen. Their female counterparts
are just as critical—the housekeepers at hotels and in the homes of the professional class.
And their poor treatment is starting to cause concern.
Newspapers in the Gulf area occasionally carry accounts of worker discontent. A pop-
ular article in the National newspaper of Abu Dhabi was the story of a Bangladeshi maid
who cut off her employer's penis because she was sick of the seventy-year-old man trying
to sexually molest her. Domestic workers like maids, housekeepers and cleaners in hotels
and private businesses and homes depend on the fairness of their employers since there
are few laws protecting them. The maid told the police she took drastic measures because
she saw no other way to stop him from raping her. These domestic workers are as vulner-
able as construction workers in the face of cruel employers.
When asked, locals point out that no matter how bad the situation in the UAE it has
to be better than at home or else all those workers wouldn't pay the shifty recruiters to be
sent to Dubai. And the remittances they send home are further proof. Somehow, most of
the workers send the lion's share of their small salaries home, preferring to live miserably
in those camps so that their children can be sent to school.
In the globalized world these labor practices are largely hidden and Dubai doesn't suf-
fer any opprobrium. The city of Dubai welcomed 8.3 million foreign tourists in 2010,
while the huge country of India, home of many of the construction workers, received fewer
than 6 million foreign tourists.
Tourists visiting Dubai see a modern, forward-looking country with designer hotels and
splashy music concerts. They have no idea of the medieval social practices underpinning
this twenty-first-century lifestyle. This is “pick and choose” globalization: embracing open-
skies airline policies to challenge European supremacy and bring in tourists; selectively
opening borders to attract migrant workers while rejecting the other promises of globaliz-
ation to improve lives with fair employment laws and respect of human rights.