Class Status Power and Human Rights : Migrant Workers in the United Arab Emirates

Oppressed Labor

The United Arab Emirates is funding a more than $20 billion cultural hub. The U.A.E. is using migrant workers of mostly South Asian origin in their workforce (around 42.5% of the workforce are migrants from South Asia[1]). According to The Guardian, migrant workers are operating in prison conditions. In the article Migrants building UAE cultural hub 'working in prison conditions', worker’s have restricted freedoms and are subjected to inhumane policies and living conditions that degrade their rights as humans. One may ask why the migrant workers allow themselves to be exploited and continue to live in inhumane conditions, but that line of questioning assumes that the workers, who come from impoverished backgrounds and from regions with little options for sustainable income, have a feasible choice not to.

Construction workers at the Burj Dubai

The migrant workers, aside from having to work in the brutal heat of the desert nations, have to deal with tight restrictions on what they can do, “several thousand workers in the official labor camp on Saadiyat Island in Abu Dhabi were subject to segregation, a 10pm curfew and monitoring by security guards, and could only enter or leave on authorized buses.”[2] Already, the workers are being segregated from regular citizens of the U.A.E. by being forced to live in these special work camps. In addition, they have little to no freedom to pursue their interests as the camp has curfews set to prevent the workers from going out anywhere. According to Marx, the bourgeoisie (in this case the U.A.E.) transform “… personal worth into exchange value…”[3] They are being treated as disposable commodities rather than humans.

However, why don’t the migrant workers just get up and leave the squalid condition where “bathrooms [are] shared by 20 men without proper sanitation, sewage outside the main entrance, and makeshift food markets that looked like refuse dumps…” It makes sense that the workers would leave after realizing how bad the condition are; however, many of the workers were in “serious debt as a result of paying illegal recruitment fees to gain work on the island.” Through this debt, the U.A.E. is able to keep the workers in control and is able to keep a constant workforce, which fulfills Erik, Olin, and Wrights first criteria for class exploitation: that, “The material welfare of one group of people causally depends on the material deprivations of another.”[4] Without the migrant workers, the U.A.E. would be without a reliable workforce. It needs to keep the workers in debt to keep them working on their precious cultural hub.

Link to Guardian article

[1] "Daily Commercial News - UAE workforce includes large number of workers from India, conference told". Dcnonl.com. 2008-06-26. Retrieved 2015-10-27.

[2] Batty, David. "Migrants Building UAE Cultural Hub 'working in Prison Conditions'" The Gaurdian. The Gaurdian, 4 Apr. 2015. Web. 30 Nov. 2015.

[3] Marx, Classes in Capitalism and Pre-Capitalism, pg. 37

[4] Erik, Olin, Wright, Class Counts, pg. 58