My mom sent me an email with images on the current construction in Dubai, a city in the United Arab Emrites (UAE). When you look at these images, they truly do boast the amazing design and architecture!

Built on artificial islands, thousands of homes, hotels, luxury stores, a new downtown, and what many anticipate to be the tallest office building in the world, one may wonder how all this is going to be funded. Although Dubai is an oil-rich city, construction of this scale is inconceivable in most 1st world countries.. Weird huh? It would be extremely expensive to do anything like this in the United States. The project budget for the tower is at 4.1 billion USD, while the new town is at 20 billion USD. Seems affordable and kind of small for such a large-scale development. From stereotypes, I got to thinking that perhaps the oil and labor costs makes it all possible.. and after my research, it just may be true.

The average income per capita in the UAE is at 2,106 USD a month. But that’s not all - the main labor force for the construction are migrant workers, hence they are getting paid less - a total of 175 USD a month. Not only are migrant workers subjected to exploitation, they are also left unprotected by the government who had conceived the project in the first place. Unpaid wages have been reported, passports are held “to protect labor stock”, health and safety are minimal, and migrant workers arrive indebted to their passage. Most of them come from India, Pakistan, China, Philippines, and Bangladesh… With exploitation that great, the UAE may just live as well as the United States and resemble its notorious exploitation of third world labor.

Read more about it:
1. http://hrw.org/reports/2006/uae1106/ - Human Rights Watch report
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burj_Dubai - Wikipedia

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