Dubai, from Riches-to-rags

Dubai’s Labor Ghetto

(Asia Sentinel) Feb 18, 2008 — Although Dubai and its neighboring Gulf emirates have posted economic growth in recent years that would embarrass China, much of it is built on an invisible worker army — predominantly South Asian — whose endless toil is crucial to Dubai’s massive boom and who are housed in a slum of astonishing proportions, hidden in the dunes between Dubai and Sarjah.

Without Sonapur, as it is called, Dubai’s spas and tax-free splendor likely wouldn’t exist. It is a Middle Eastern Soweto of as many as 500,000 foreign laborers, mostly from the impoverished rural villages of the Asian subcontinent.

Sonapur is one of the biggest communities in the United Arab Emirates but it doesn’t seem to officially exist. It isn’t found on official maps, road signs or even Wikipedia. Its wretched sprawl of filthy dormitories is concealed in the dunes, an anonymous slum hidden from the Dubaians whose apartments its residents built. The best way to find Sonapur is to follow one of the myriad worker buses that shuttle between the many building sites. Some 90 minutes away is a heaving sandswept plain of utilitarian four-story dormitories as far as the eye can see, punctuated by the occasional store selling ghee, naan and curry powders.

Burj Dubai tower stands 818 m (2,684 ft) high.

Dubai gleams with world-class infrastructure but Sonapur’s roads are gravel and sand with few footpaths. Open sewers are common. There’s none of the grass that Dubai’s luxury developments specialize in claiming from the desert. The United Arab Emirates is strictly Islamic and Sonapur’s few places of worship for Hindus and Buddhists tend to be makeshift.

Dubai’s economy expanded by 35 percent in 2006, and about 20 percent last year. It’s not oil ‑ that ran out decades ago. Dubai’s rags-to-riches miracle relies on an age-old business plan: slave labor in the form of millions of poor Sri Lankans, Indians, Pakistanis, Filipinos and Africans working up to 80 hour-plus weeks. They have built this gleaming oasis. With their passports seized as insurance, these bonded workers toil in near year-round 45-50 degree heat for about $US8 a day.

It’s almost as if Dubai’s employers have scanned the latest global wealth survey and zeroed in on the poorest 20 nations to staff their projects. Promised riches but paid salaries well below the OECD poverty line, they have been deployed here by unscrupulous middlemen charitably described as “employment agencies” who wouldn’t have been out of place in 1780s Atlanta.

Boosters argue the emirate is correcting the world’s economic imbalance. The US was also built on immigrant labor, they note, ignoring the fact that those immigrants to the US could at least become citizens, which is impossible in the UAE.

Dubai riot police and security forces surround a labor camp.