Workers Without Rights: The Untold Story of Labor Exploitation in the UAE
Photos and videos of Dubai, Abu Dhabi, or other wealthy cities in the United Arab Emirates, are often viewed as beautiful, elegant utopias. These cities contain some of the most impressive engineering and creative projects of the 21st century. However, while these cities are world-renowned for their brilliant architectural landscapes and luxury environments, all this wealth and beauty is masking a terrifying reality. The reality is that these cities have been built on the exploitation of foreign workers, particularly those arriving from India and Africa.
Many of these workers are employed under what’s called the kafala system– an unjust employment process that essentially binds workers to their employers while working in the UAE. The system is textbook deception and exploitation, as it entails that workers visa statuses are entirely dependent on their job performance. This is inherently corrupt, as visa statuses for these workers are determined by their employer’s level of satisfaction. Worse still, many of these workers have no idea what they’re getting into. These kafala system contractual agreements are extremely vague and almost exclusively written in Arabic, a language that many foreign workers are unfamiliar with. Once employed under the kafala system, employers effectively have free reign to do whatever they want with their employees, for the following reasons.
Everything from a worker’s salary to their living conditions to their employee meals are entirely determined by their employer. If a worker decides to violate their contract in any way before their term is up, they can face hefty fines, prison time, or even deportation. This makes it next to impossible for employees to leave abusive work environments, which has made absurdly long work hours, physical abuse, sexual abuse, mental abuse, and unpaid work fairly common. The kafala system essentially allows for employers to get away with slave labor, all while doing so under the ruse of a wealthy and prosperous environment.
Employers in the UAE often insist that their workers have representation, as they are typically allowed to join local professional labor associations. However, this is all a ruse, as while they can join these organizations, they do not have voting rights and are forbidden from serving on association boards. The corruption doesn’t end with employers either, as the Emirati government bears heavy responsibility for facilitating this exploitation. Even beyond the sanctioning of the kafala system, the downright illegality of labor unions, and the lack of enforcement of labor rules and regulations, the government itself often directly subjects workers, particularly foreign workers, to unfair punishments and treatment.
For example, it is not uncommon for the government to deport members of protests and strikes who are not Emirati citizens, and nearly all of these labor-related protests and strikes are promptly halted by the government anyway. While this issue has largely failed to receive extensive press coverage, one event, the highly publicized Dubai Expo 2020, was egregious enough to bring the issue to light on a larger scale. The Expo, which claims to “place equality, universal respect and human dignity at the centre of human progress”, enabled some of the worst worker exploitation in all of the UAE. In an influential report published by the British human rights organization Equidem, titled “‘EXPOsed: Discrimination and Forced Labour Practices at Expo 2020 Dubai’”, researchers take a deep dive into the extent of worker exploitation at the expo. In addition to the exploitative practices discussed earlier, migrant workers at Expo 2020 were subject to even more exploitation, which Equidem discovered through a series of 69 confidential interviews with workers employed by the expo. The interviewees were kept anonymous, as if employers discovered their employees were speaking out, the interviewees would almost certainly face prison time, fines, or deportation. These interviews found that over half of all workers at Expo 2020 were subject to “recruitment fees”, extra payments that they were required to make in order to secure jobs at the fair. These fees are illegal even in the UAE, but were seldom enforced at the Expo.
Workers also reported racial and ethnic discrimination, as minor slip ups would often result in redundancy without pay, disproportionally affecting African or dark-skinned employees. This discrimination is widespread, as interviewed employees have stated that “all except [UAE] nationals are considered “second category staff”, and treated as such. The expo has also subjected migrant workers to even more entrapment than originally thought. In several cases, officials at the expo have taken employees’ passports from them, and subsequently required employees to sign a document stating that they still have their passport as a requirement to their contract. These practices have contributed to Expo 2020 and the UAE as a whole to be one of the worst places for migrant workers, as the workers themselves have called their situations “slave labor”.
Today, over 90% of employees in the UAE are foreign workers, making the nation quite economically dependent on them, as well as the exploitative practices which make them so efficient. This dependence makes it unlikely that the UAE will abandon this exploitation without international intervention. Many nations around the world publicly condemn similar acts of exploitation in their home countries, so it is surprising that these violations have led to minimal international condemnation. Many nations are likely persuaded not to speak out due to trade partnerships with the emirates, in which negative relations with the UAE could lead to negative economic impacts. However, without action, what is essentially slave labor will continue to exist within the United Arab Emirates.