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.”

... contd.