The Emirati economy almost entirely depends on cheap labour, now 99 per cent of the private sector’s workforce. Migrant workers from India, Dubai’s most valuable “labour exporting country,” comprise 60 per cent of the 1.2 million (majority-Keralite) Indian residents in the U.A.E. While the U.A.E. is highly interventionist in matters of financial investment, it has largely neglected the labour sector, enacting some policy revisions only after embarrassing scandals which turned international attention away from its pop-fantasy skyline and toward the workers’ near-medieval conditions of servitude.

The U.A.E.’s Ministry of Labour claims that worker conditions are improving. In 2007, it published the 23-page “Protection of the Rights of Workers in the U.A.E.,” which includes unremarkable modifications such as making the confiscation of a non-U.A.E. national’s passport illegal. The changes serve to highlight the government’s extreme negligence over corporate labour practices. The Indian government has up to now been too lax about the safety and well-being of its workers overseas. Taking active measures to protect the human rights of all Indian nationals, especially the weakest, is imperative.

India should demand that the U.A.E. adopt the full standards of the International Labour Organisation. While the U.A.E. has adopted some standards, it ignores some of the most important criteria of the ILO’s Declaration of Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work, including the freedom of association and the right to collective bargaining. After a protest by construction workers in Abu Dhabi in February 2007, the Ministry of Labour quietly expelled 14 of the “instigators.” Workers should not be criminalised for demanding basic rights.

The Ministry of Labour’s website boasts a worker “break” period from 12.30 pm to 3 pm in July and August, when temperatures surge above 110 degrees Fahrenheit. Yet it fails to mention that the break used to extend until 4.30 pm, before construction companies lobbied the government. Corporate pressure is all the more egregious as most megaproject developers pay no taxes, and many are owned 100 per cent by ruling Emirati governments.

Further, the U.A.E. has failed to put in practice a minimum wage, as required by its own 1980 labour law. Migrant construction labourers, likely the country’s lowest-paid workers, make between $1.40 to $4.00 a day in an economy projected to invite $1.9 trillion in building. No standardised regulation exists for worker’s wages, sanitation, job safety, and medical care.

Because of the sinking value of the dirham, Indian workers make 500 rupees less a month doing the same amount of work as previous years. Rather than raising wages to keep up with soaring inflation rates, the corporate state is looking elsewhere for even cheaper labour. Gary Hanzard of Arabtec Construction put it this way: “It is harder to get, say, Indians with sufficient skills and in numbers. So we have to seek elsewhere. The Chinese are coming in and we are even going for the Vietnamese.”

The government of Dubai calls its squalid workers camps, such as Sonapur and Al-Quoz, “temporary workforce residential complexes.” As pointed out by New York-based Human Rights Watch, the GoD’s call for “adequate” housing leaves the definition ambiguous. While some employers have improved sanitary conditions and eased overcrowding, the government has not publicised the list of over 100 hundred companies that have violated existing labour laws.

The plight of women domestic workers from South Asia has been even less visible. HRW has noted that women are “at a particular risk of abuse, including food deprivation, forced confinement, and physical or sexual abuse.” The standard contract does not provide equal protection for female domestic workers, and still contains no limits on work hours, break days, workers’ compensation, or overtime pay. Women workers can look forward to one month of paid vacation every two years.

In India, families have borne a heavy burden in the U.A.E.’s schemes for “living the life.” Nearly all foreign workers travel alone, leaving families behind. As more men with limited social mobility leave their countries, the “Dubai chalo” syndrome has created negative sociopsychological effects on individuals and families, resulting from social isolation, culture shock, harsh working conditions, and the sudden increase in personal wealth. Indian women often gather the necessary funds to support migration, and male emigration means that wives, mothers, daughters, and sisters who stay behind carry the weight of the duties both inside and outside the home.

The U.A.E.’s rapacious energy for building hyperbolic-sized structures conveys a feeling of invincibility. Yet without extensive structural changes to enable enforcement of human and labour rights for over a million migrant workers, most of them Indian, the state’s claim toward advancement can only be described as illusory and exploitative.

The writer is an independent film maker and doctoral candidate at Harvard University