dubai: fear and money
Mike Davis writes:
Dubai, together with its emirate neighbors, has achieved the state of the art in the disenfranchisement of labour. In a country that only abolished slavery in 1963, trade unions, most strikes and all agitators are illegal, and 99 per cent of the private-sector workforce are immediately deportable non-citizens. Indeed, the deep thinkers at the American Enterprise and Cato Institutes must salivate when they contemplate the system of classes and entitlements in Dubai.
At the top of the social pyramid, of course, are the al-Maktoums and their cousins who own every lucrative grain of sand in the sheikhdom. Next, the native 15 per cent of the population (many of them originally Arab-speakers from southern Iran) constitutes a leisure class whose uniform of privilege is the traditional white dishdash. Their obedience to the dynasty is rewarded by income transfers, free education, subsidized homes and government jobs. A step below are the pampered mercenaries: more than 100,000 British expatriates (another 100,000 uk citizens own second homes or condos in Dubai), along with other European, Lebanese, Iranian and Indian managers and professionals, who take full advantage of their air-conditioned affluence and two months of overseas leave every summer. The Brits, led by David Beckham (who owns a beach) and Rod Stewart (who owns an island), are probably the biggest cheerleaders for al-Maktoums paradise, and many of them luxuriate in a social world that recalls the lost splendour of gin-and-tonics at Raffles and white mischief in Simlas bungalows. Dubai is expert at catering to colonial nostalgia.
The city-state is also a miniature Raj in a more important and notorious aspect. The great mass of the population are South Asian contract labourers, legally bound to a single employer and subject to totalitarian social controls. Dubais luxury lifestyles are attended by vast numbers of Filipina, Sri Lankan and Indian maids, while the building boom (which employs fully one-quarter of the workforce) is carried on the shoulders of an army of poorly paid Pakistanis and Indians, the largest contingent from Kerala, working twelve-hour shifts, six and a half days a week, in the asphalt-melting desert heat.
As Salaam u Alaikum,
“Indeed, the deep thinkers at the American Enterprise and Cato Institutes must salivate when they contemplate the system of classes and entitlements in Dubai.”
In fact, the guestworker program currently proposed in pending immigration legislations is very similar to Gulf states’ guestworker programs, and also to the Bracero programs of the 1940s.
Mike Davis really explains things well. I lived for a time in Dubai, and I saw the condition of the country and to put it mildly I was disgusted by what I saw.
I worked in a company where people didn’t even bother to pray; Muslims drank and went to night clubs; Muslims had girlfriends; I couldn’t get jobs because of my scarf; nationals looked down upon everyone; Pakistanis and Indians are treated like slaves even though they are the ones building up the country; money is the biggest distraction; alcohol is easily available along with prostitution in hotels; no one keeps their word or promise; Muslims don’t hesitate to cheat and laundering money is quite common; the satellite TV is in every home; Muslim women wear hijabs while wearing un-Islamic clothing; mosques in Dubai are obscured by tall buildings; and it goes on and on.
It was a terrible experience and I hope to never see that place again. I found Muslims but I did not find Islam…how sad are situation is, and we wonder why we are facing such hard times.
Salaam, unfortunately this all is what is being promoted – so that the elite classes can maintain their power and luxury. In Pakistan, for example, it is called “enlightened moderation.”