Dubai, the City as Corporation

1. State, Citizen, and Foreigner in Dubai

CHAPTER 1 STATE, CITIZEN, AND FOREIGNER IN DUBAI Let us decide not to imitate Europe; let us combine our muscles and our brains in a new direction. Let us try to create the whole man, whom Europe has been incapable of bringing to triumphant birth. —Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth [Capitalism] merely requires a way in, a foreign but colluding social hierarchy which extends and facilitates its action . . . the connection is made, the current transmitted. —Fernand Braudel, The Perspective of the World S hortly before I traveled to Dubai in late 2006, there appeared a report by the New York–based, nongovernmental organization Human Rights Watch (HRW) entitled “Building Towers, Cheating Workers.” The report accused the United Arab Emirates (UAE) construction industry of systematic abuses against workers, including breached contracts, wretched living conditions, and usurious financial practices. Focusing on Dubai, which at the time of the study accounted for a disproportionate part of the UAE construction sector, the report argued that state authorities and agencies—those of the federal UAE state but also, by implication, those of Dubai emirate—were complicit in these abuses, if more by omission than commission. Not surprisingly, a lot of locals were incensed. One interlocutor suggested that the report was part of the larger neoconservative agenda targeting the Arab world. Another simply denied one of its main pieces of evidence (a fact that I had personally confirmed), that there are vast labor camps on the outskirts of the city in which workers are effectively STATE, CITIZEN, AND FOREIGNER IN DUBAI 44 imprisoned. Others, such as an Indian friend living in Dubai at the time, were pleased. It was about time, he said, that the situation of the workers in the UAE was publicized. Until that point, there seemed to be nothing that could dent many locals’ sense of triumph in mithāl Dubai, the “Dubai model,” the myth of the laissezfaire utopia being advanced by the familystate and its friends.1 While the report is indeed devastating, and in my opinion perhaps one of the better works on the political economy of a Gulf state, there is more to the story of the HRW report and its ramifications than my Indian friend at first appreciated. Foreigners constitute approximately 95 percent of the workforce in the UAE (Human Rights Watch 2006, 6). Of these, the majority are migrant workers (as opposed to more well-to-do expatriates) who labor in the construction and service sectors. It is usually assumed that work in these sectors is voluntary and temporary, engaged in by South Asian and other foreign workers making purely economically rational decisions and having the liberty to seek better alternatives elsewhere should conditions in the UAE prove unappealing. One of my friends, a middle-class Indian and long-term resident of Dubai, spoke in a way typical of many more-privileged Dubai residents, “No one puts a gun to the [expatriates’] heads. If they don’t like [the working conditions] here, they can go elsewhere.” Part of the power of the HRW report was the way it exploded such complacent assumptions. It showed, for example, how common are such practices as non-payment of wages and contract switching, where employers change contracts any time they wish and/or force workers to pay for their own visas and travel expenses. Those practices are illegal according to UAE law. But the state agencies, such as the Ministry of Labor, charged with overseeing treatment of workers, are understaffed and what staff they do have are often owners of the very businesses they are supposed to be overseeing (36, 53). There is another theme in the HRWreport that has been less remarked upon, and it is the jumping-off point for this chapter. The report lists a set of demands on the UAE government, such as establishing independent commissions of inquiry, public reporting of labor disputes and their resolution process, the removal of bans on human rights organizations, and banishment of corrupt companies (16–17). On September 28, 2006, Abdulaziz Nasser Al Shamsi, the permanent representative of the UAE to the United Nations, conveyed in a letter to HRW the UAE Labor Minister’s response to the organization’s report, to whit: STATE, CITIZEN, AND FOREIGNER IN DUBAI 45 Workers hosted by the UAE and other [Gulf Cooperation Council ] countries cannot be considered migrant workers [which would entitle them to rights stipulated in the UN’s...