The people who control the oil-rich states in the Arabian Gulf have learned that money isn’t everything. For one thing, it doesn’t impress the world, since the world assumes (wrongly) that it’s easy to dig oil from the ground or the ocean floor. So in recent years the Gulf princes and their advisers have decided they want something more.
Prestige, for instance, and culture, and influence. They want others to think well of them. They want to be civilized and they think they know how to do that: buy some civilization from countries that have too much of it but not as much money as they think they need.
Qatar, Bahrain, Abu Dhabi and other states in the Gulf are frantically busy re-inventing themselves, changing their image. They are becoming up-to-the-minute modern states with universities, museums, skyscrapers, high-quality architecture and European-style tourist hotels. The 2020 World Expo is coming to Dubai and the 2022 World Cup to Qatar. Even the Louvre Abu Dhabi is there, with the help of the Louvre Paris, “Bringing Cultures Closer Together in the First Period of Globalisation” — a unique and universal museum, according to their website.
Everywhere new buildings are rising, with more promised for the future. The Gulf states see themselves as winners among the nations but unfortunately the losers are the people who literally build the buildings — the many thousands of exploited, indentured migrant workers who lack the protection of governments or unions. They come to the Gulf, make a pittance to send home and eventually depart, still poor.
Foreign architects, designers and planners who work in the Gulf try to avoid labour issues. The late Zaha Hadid, the Iraqi-born British architect who was the first woman to receive the Pritzker Prize, was asked about it in 2014. She replied: “I have nothing to do with the workers. I think that’s an issue for the government to take care of. It’s not my duty as an architect to look at it.”
This week New York University’s Stern Center for Business and Human Rights released a highly negative report, Making Workers Pay: Recruitment of the Migrant Labor Force in the Gulf Construction Industry.
The Gulf Cooperation Council — Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Oman — are developing with the furious energy of states that have glimpsed their destiny and want to achieve it as soon as possible. The workers, typically from small villages in Bangladesh and India, are often illiterate and not hard to scam.
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They are most obviously cheated when they pay for their own recruitment, according to the Stern report. Agents are commissioned to find them, screen them for appropriate skills, arrange their visas and travel. The agents demand that the workers pay the bill for everything, roughly one or two thousand dollars. That often requires that the worker take out an expensive loan, which puts him in the category of indentured labour.
In a recent interview a 24-year-old Pakistani talked about arriving in 2014 to work on the Louvre Abu Dhabi. He reported that he had paid more than $2,200 to a Lahore-based recruiter, which meant it would take him four years or more to break even. Outside the job, he said, “I have only time to eat and sleep.”
In all the Gulf countries, the Stern report says, local employers automatically acquire significant power over their workers. It becomes difficult for a migrant to change jobs, lodge a complaint or even return home without permission from the employer (who may be holding the migrant’s passport). The housing for workers is cramped and uncomfortable, the meals inadequate — and there’s no authority to negotiate for better conditions. There are laws protecting the workers, but they are at best unevenly enforced.
In some cases the planning for much of this development has been so grandiloquent that it turns into a kind of comedy. Nobody in the Gulf seems to believe that slow and easy does the job but Abu Dhabi has set new records for hurried, exaggerated plans, royal pomposity and sheepish apology.
A few years ago the crown prince, Mohammed bin Zayed al Nahyan, set forth the future for Saadiyat Island, a $27-billion development. He decreed that it would include luxury hotels and a boutique shopping quarter. But the crucial section was a cultural district with a Guggenheim museum at its core. It would, if everything worked out, stimulate a modern Arab Renaissance. What could go wrong? Everything.
Thomas Krens, director of the Guggenheim, and creator of Frank Gehry’s museum in Bilbao, hoped that his organization would realize a fee of $114-million for providing a new Guggenheim museum and planning Saadiyat’s cultural district with buildings by the world’s most prominent architects.
But the drop in the price of oil and the instability caused by the Arab Spring have together stalled most of the projects. Guggenheim’s dreams of riches have been disappointed, for the time being, and Saadiyat looks in places like an abandoned construction site. Now, with the Stern report and the world-wide growth of negative publicity about migrant workers, the best laid plans of oil billionaires are proving nothing but vanity.
National Post
robert.fulford@utoronto.ca
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