SHARJAH, United Arab Emirates, 15 April 2006 — A sweltering fog still shrouded the East Coast & Hamriah Co. labor camp when, dressed in the equivalent of their Sunday best, the migrant workers set out after dawn Tuesday. They didn’t shower beforehand. Water was cut last year to their shantytown, now abandoned by their employer. They didn’t eat breakfast. They have no electricity to cook.
They simply bundled into plastic bags their yellowing court papers, an 18-month chronicle of their attempt to get paid by a now bankrupt company, and began their trek on foot — six, maybe seven miles — to the Sharjah Federal Court.
“Either they pay us or send our corpses home,” said Imtiaz Ahmed Siddiq, one of the South Asian laborers, who has made the trek to the court more than 50 times since last year. “If they pay us, we’ll go home alive. If they don’t pay us, we’ll go home dead.”
For a decade now, the United Arab Emirates and, in particular, its powerhouse of a city-state, Dubai, have represented a rare success story in a troubled Arab world, a story of breakneck, even reckless development, investment and optimism. Nothing is too grand in the Emirates’ Oz-like vision: An underwater hotel, an indoor ski slope and man-made islands shaped like the palms that grace Gulf beaches crowded with tourists. But there is growing unrest among the hundreds of thousands of unskilled workers here who have built the country’s skylines, crowded with one-fifth of the world’s cranes.
Although unions are banned, workers have launched strikes over the past year to protest living conditions, salaries of $4 to $7 a day, and hazardous workplaces where human rights groups say deaths are sometimes covered up. In March, workers rioted at the site of Burj Dubai — envisioned as the world’s tallest skyscraper — wrecking cars, computers and construction equipment. Last weekend, 1,000 workers rampaged in their camp.
Siddiq and the workers of the East Coast & Hamriah Co. live in conditions so bleak as to test their lingering faith. Their story is a Kafkaesque tale of those left behind, as they pursue salaries of hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars by trekking every few days to a court that has become their bane and hope. “They keep us coming and going,” Siddiq said, as the fog started to give way to the desert sun.
Their camp is in an industrial area on the edge of Sharjah, one of seven emirates that make up the UAE. With no money for taxis, the men walked down the dirt road, past piles of gravel and heavy machinery. They turned left. There were murmurs, but usually they just stayed silent, as if idle talk would attract too much attention.
The landscape before them opened like a quilt: Dirt roads soon gave way to paved streets, cinder block and corrugated tin to concrete, battered Toyota pickups to Mercedeses.
Siddiq and Banwari Lal Bairawa, a 30-year-old Indian, have emerged as leaders of sorts of the 30 or so men who live in the camp, a warren of collapsing prefabricated dwellings set over dirt packed hard as concrete. Water bottles, white yogurt containers, discarded shoes, newspapers and other trash are piled along one of the shanties. Across other paths, pools of sewage collect, runoff from a latrine flooded long ago. The water dispenser is rusted; water was cut two months ago after the company stopped paying bills. Kitchens — each little more than a dank room with a butane tank hooked to a burner — are abandoned. With electricity cut, the rooms are too dark to use.
Siddiq’s story is much like the others’: Raised on Indian films and stories told by returning emigrants with cellphones, cameras and fancy clothes, he paid an agent $1,000 nine years ago to help him secure a job in the Emirates. Once here, he was paid about $200 a month. He was almost never paid on time and when he was, money was deducted for housing, medical insurance, visas and so on. He quit on Dec. 31, 2004, and demanded what he was owed. The following year, the company went bankrupt: The Lebanese owner went to Canada, and the other owner, from the Emirates, was absolved of liability, according to Hussein Yusuf, the company’s attorney.
Since then, Siddiq has received no money and like the others, has run up a debt of hundreds of dollars at a nearby store for rice, flour, oil and vegetables. He has not seen his two daughters and son since 2002 and no longer sends money home. As with most of the men, Siddiq’s visa has expired, as has his Indian passport.
The other men — most from India, two from Bangladesh and one from Pakistan — huddled around him, and he pulled out a torn piece of paper, bound with masking tape and folded four times. It bore the date April 13, 2005 and was an order from the Sharjah court for the company to pay him 17,630 dirhams, almost $4,800, in addition to a ticket to his home in Bihar, India. Most of the men have similar court orders, pending appeals; the largest sum is for Chanan Rao, a 26-year veteran, who is owed nearly $6,000.
The trek to the court Tuesday took two hours, and there was a logic behind their numbers. “If there’s one or two, they won’t listen to us,” Siddiq said. “When there’s more, they’ll pay attention.”
Siddiq and Bairawa led the team to the desk at the courthouse, behind a colonnade of arches and arabesque.
“Not everybody here,” demanded the receptionist, Ali Al-Mulla. “We only need one. Everybody else out.”
Later the judge, Abdel-Rahman bin Talia, also asked the same question: “Why are you coming every day?” He bellowed as they entered. The same list followed: Electricity, water and, of course, their salaries.
“You want to take your money? Bring someone who will buy all the company’s stuff,” the judge said.
Bin Talia then cooled down and tried to reassure them.
“We’ll see,” he said. “Wait a week or two, and we’ll see if something can be done.”
Bairawa came out, and the men huddled around him. He explained what had been said, and they frowned.
“It’s all bad,” Siddiq said, shaking his head. “The day they tell us they’re not giving us our money, we’ll take our lives. Right there,” he said, pointing to the courthouse’s staircase. “The same day.”
Bairawa, calmer, shrugged his shoulders. “We’ll keep coming,” he said. At 11 a.m., the men walked down the staircase and out into the pallid sunlight. They navigated the traffic, horns blaring as the group crossed. And they clambered back into the idling boat, paying their 14 cents for the trek back.
