What about the workers? Immigrants pose dilemma

Richard Dean
8 Jul 2009

A shopping mall in the desert city of Al Ain has banned male construction workers at evenings and weekends after wealthy customers complained about them staring at women. Labourers are allowed to enter Al Bawadi Mall during weekdays, but only through a side entrance.

The move has provoked outrage among liberal residents in the UAE. State-owned newspaper The National decried the move: “Expelling labourers from malls will not make them vanish, and exiling them outside to spend a few hours they have for themselves is neither just nor humane.”

The flashpoint is a new twist to an old argument: what to do with the UAE's vast army of male construction workers. In 2006, Human Rights Watch reported that of the UAE's four million population, about 600,000 were labourers, “primarily illiterate, poor men from South Asia from rural communities”. That number may have fluctuated a bit since, but the fundamentals still hold.

This workforce is economically vital but socially unacceptable. Most labourers live in sprawling dormitories on the outskirts of places such as Al Ain, the prosperous second city of oil-rich Abu Dhabi. (Al Ain is about 70 miles from Dubai, and a popular day trip for British tourists). They earn a few hundred dollars a month at best, and under strict immigration rules, that's not enough to bring their families.

The result: large groups of poor, badly educated working-class men roaming around with little to do on their days off. Whether you're in Dubai or Dulwich, middle-class housewives don't like that. Formal discrimination isn't the answer, but what is? The National concludes that “there must be a solution better than an outright ban” — while failing to suggest an alternative.

* A newspaper owned by the government of Dubai has been shut down for 20 days by a Federal court. Al Emarat Al Youm was punished for a story alleging that horses owned by a member of the Abu Dhabi ruling family were given performance-enhancing drugs. The editor and chief executive of the newspaper were each fined about £4000.

* British trade minister Lord Davies has increased the pressure on Dubai property developers to pay their UK contractors, which are reportedly owed hundreds of millions of pounds. “People are owed money and they have to be paid,” he said on a visit to Abu Dhabi. Still, Davies stressed that he believed in the long-term future of Dubai. In his previous job as chief executive and chairman of Standard Chartered, the bank invested heavily to make Dubai its hub for the Middle East and Africa.