Invisible most of Dubai Bashny.Net

Dubai and the neighboring emirates quite succeeded in abusing the rights of workers. In a country where slavery is prohibited only since 1963. Trade unions, strikes and agitators are forbidden, and 99% of workers in the private sector - this is easily deported aliens

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At the top of the social pyramid, of course, are the Al Maktoum and their relatives who own the emirate every grain of sand generating profits. Next come the indigenous people make up 15% of the total population, whose privilege is wearing a traditional white dishdashas. They are a leisure class whose loyalty to the dynasty redistribute profits in their favor, free education and jobs in the public sector

Most of the population are South Asian contract workers are legally attached to a single employer and under totalitarian social control. Lifestyle Dubai is supported by a huge number of Filipino, Sri Lankan and Indian maids, while the building boom made possible by the hands of the army of low-paid Pakistanis and Indians working twelve hours a day, six and a half days a week in a blast furnace-like desert.

Dubai, like its neighbors, flouts labor standards of the International Labour Organization and refuses to adopt an international convention on migrant workers. Human Rights Watch in 2003 accused the Emirates in the fact that their prosperity is based on "forced labor." Moreover, as recently emphasized in a revealing article about Dubai British "Independent": "The labor market is very similar to the old system of bonded labor, embedded in Dubai of its former colonial masters, the British." "Like their impoverished forefathers - the newspaper continues, - today the Asian workers have to resign ourselves to real slavery for many years if they are in the United Arab Emirates. Their rights disappear at the airport where recruiting agents confiscated passports and visas »

These slaves are subjected to Dubai is not just over-exploitation - it is assumed that they must be completely hidden from prying eyes. The local press (and the UAE stands at 137th place in the world for press freedom) does not dare to talk about migrant workers about working conditions and about prostitution. But Asian workers are strictly forbidden to appear in shiny shopping malls, golf courses fresh and prim restaurants

nylye camp on the outskirts of the city, in which the workers are crowded six, eight, even twelve people in the room without ventilation, are not part of the official tourist image of the city - the center of luxury without slums and poverty. They say that even the United Arab Emirates Minister of Labour during a recent visit was deeply shocked by the squalid, almost unbearable conditions in a remote work camp belonging to a major construction contractor. However, as soon as the workers tried to form a union to obtain salaries and better living conditions, they were immediately arrested

And although Dubai police turned a blind eye to the dubious smuggled gold and diamonds, trade in prostitutes and shady characters, buying from 25 estates in cash, they are alive deported complaining about the non-issuance of the salary of the Pakistani workers and arrested the Filipino maids for "debauchery" as they inform on host for rape. To avoid Shiite performances, which so familiar gentlemen Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, Dubai, along with its neighbors in the UAE draws labor from western India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal and the Philippines. But such a policy rammed and rally the masses of Asian workers who quietly become discontented majority. In response, the United Arab Emirates have adopted a "policy of cultural tolerance," which prohibits the employment of Asians and must be diluted with a lot of new Arab workers

But discrimination against Asians did not help; the salary of 100-150 dollars a month many Arabs are not swallowed, and the reverse side of its building boom terrible neglect of technical security and basic needs of the workers has created the first ever Dubai rebellion.

Only in 2004. 880 construction workers were killed on construction sites that drowns as the private traders and the state. Construction giants and contractors do not provide basic sanitation and clean water supply of labor camps in the desert. Workers endure long journeys to work, petty zadirstvo authorities (often on religious and racial grounds), spies and guards in their camps, dependent labor and government inaction in cases of volatile contractors who, under the pretext of bankruptcy fold up shop and disappear without paying the salary

And so the first impulse came in the autumn of 2004. When several thousand Indian workers bravely launched a march to the Ministry of Labour along the eight-Sheikh Zayed Avenue, which, however, dispersed in the presence of armed police officials, threatening mass deportations. Demonstrations and strikes against the smaller-scale non-payment of wages and hazardous working conditions continued during 2005., Heated by a large spring uprising of Bangladeshi workers in Kuwait. In September of the same year, 7,000 workers organized a three hour demonstration - the largest protest in the history of Dubai.

Later, in March 2006. the cruelty of the guards provoked a pogrom on a vast construction site of the tower Burj Dubai. 2500 iznurёnnyh workers after the change of expected strong latecomers bus when security beginning to find fault with him. Enraged workers beat the guard and started a pogrom construction headquarters, burning branded cars, and smashing office equipment, cracking safes. The next morning, the workers refused to work, and had intended to go on strike as long as their employer «Al Naboodah Laing O'Rourke» will not raise wages and improve working conditions. The strike was joined by thousands of builders of the new airport terminal.

Although some concessions, interspersed with threats returned to the majority of workers on the construction site, the embers of discontent continue to fester. In July, hundreds of workers of the "Arab stables" on the Emirates road pogrom, to protest against the lack of clean water for cooking and washing in their camp. Other workers have organized trade union meeting illegal and repeatedly threatened to picket hotels and malls

Defiant labor loud voice speaks in the desert United Arab Emirates, Dubai has sucked for the same amount of cheap labor as clocked on speculation and oil and Maktoum, along with their counterparts in other emirates, clearly recognize that the kingdom is ruled by resting on the backs of the South Asian labor. So much depends on the image of Dubai as a paradise unwavering capital that the slightest tremor is not proportional to respond to investor confidence. Management has considered a variety of options in Dubai response to workers' protests - from expulsions and mass arrests to limited cooperation in collective agreements. But all sorts of concessions may not only cause new union demands, but also the requirements of citizenship - that undermine the foundations of absolutism maktumovskogo

Sheikh Mo, who poses as a prophet of modernization, likes to impress visitors wise proverbs and weighty aphorisms. His favorite: "Anyone who does not try to change the future, remains a prisoner of the past»

Nevertheless, the future that he is building in Dubai - to the applause of billionaires and multinational corporations around the world - more like a nightmare from the past: Walt Disney meets Albert Speer on the Arabian coast.