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Having spent a better part of a year in Bahrain , and mingling with these people personally. It's not that simple. My manservant came with the rent. Rent which was 4000 BHD between my villa and the attached one he cared for. His pay was 100BD/month (and free boarding. He lived in the pool room of the other Villa.) He was taking care of a wife, kids, and putting a son through college back home. Even on the local Navy base the people at the barbershop/salon make 150BD a month. (barbers are contractors and do not work for he base directly. Base pays the contractor which pays the workers). All the people back home really know is that money is coming home. I've been next to friends when their family calls from India, Filipines, Ethiopia, or Thailand looking for cash. Most of the Pakistanis arent; doing too bad in Bahrain, though. They make the bulk of the better blue collar jobs, like policemen. Whcih makes it a bad day for the Indian populace.
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Originally Posted by GreyFox
So wait. You mean to tell me that the Ethiopians, Pakistanis, Indians, Filipinos and other people who go to these areas don't know what is going on there? So why do they keep going?
Keep in mind that there is a huge industry of middlemen who keep the flow of workers to these countries going. And they are getting paid quite well while their country men get the short end of the stick. But this is the main economic system in that area of the world from the Gulf into China proper, which is seasonal migrant labor. There are villages and towns with multiple generations who have done the same type of work. When Saddam built his infrastructure with the help of the French and the West they used migrant laborers from South Asia.
But watching this video it seems that people in these places that are sending their children are HAPPY to send them off to get exploited. I understand this is the third world but you mean to tell me nobody has sent word back about the exploitation? You know what would end this? When the Nepalese and other folks stop shipping their children off to these other countries and demand better treatment and a better economy where they live. You mean to tell me you can have all your working age men off in foreign countries building modern infrastructure while you live in a hut? what kind of nonsense is that? Revealed: Qatar's World Cup 'slaves' | Global development | The Guardian
If you don't like a country as a foreigner, don't go or live there.
People are not rational or mainly for the money. Not belonging to a country, don't like it and still stay there.
If you don't like a country as a foreigner, don't go or live there.
People are not rational or mainly for the money. Not belonging to a country, don't like it and still stay there.
You apparently didn't read the full article...or don't have very good reading comprehension.
I found the article pretty partisan and snarky, in addition to being six years old. Dubai has plenty of human rights issues. I recommend this for a read: Dubai Economic Boom Comes at a Price for Workers : NPR Dubai has a very serious problem, like many cities. Foreign construction workers lived "eight and ten to a room in labor camps" and many are trapped in a cycle of poverty and debt, which amounts to little more than indentured servitude.
I'll get into that in a minute, but I'd caution against railing against a city that you've never been to - referring to it as a deplorable city and citing a partisan article from nearly six years ago. I don't want to pigeon-hole myself into an opinion because I don't have one, but I'm surprised that you're taking that stand without having been there.
The article itself reads pretty polarizing as in the first sentence, it takes a certain shot at Sheikh Mohammed being the "absolute ruler".
Yeah, we probably don't have much partisanship here...
Karen's story is sad, but it's also a story of one who admitted to living in a ridiculous fashion that she never would have had she still been in North America. She and Daniel treated Dubai like their own personal playground. As a fiscal conservative, I sort of get the impression that other fellow Americans who claim to be also, or even libertarian, might embrace the idea of individual responsibility when it comes to finances. I'm glad Daniel's prison sentence wasn't too long and I hope she was able to cope until he got out. Theirs is admittedly a story of willful ignorance and irresponsibility.
Getting back to the introduction, my point is that if anyone views Dubai differently than they view, say, Las Vegas, they're fooling themselves. In the United States, who builds those casinos and towers in the desert? How much are they paid hourly? Who works the front desks of the casinos? I can tell you from experience that a Guest Services Manager at a major casino hotel is paid somewhere south of $35,000 per year. What do those under him or her make? What do the dishwasher's that clean the plates of the expensive buffets make?
Do you ever walk down a corridor in a hotel in an expensive city and walk past the housekeeper cleaning rooms and feel bad? I do, and you should. If we have this global view of the world of other country's having what we view as being slaves making slave-wages and stuck in a cycle of poverty - what do we have? We take labor classes from Asia, India, Mexico, and Central America and "allow" them to work for us for low wages without benefits but [out of sight, out of mind] because "they can leave and go to another job whenever they want," so we feel better about it. In essence, though, they're stuck in a very similar pattern. What's the pragmatic difference?
at least you don't get stoned for being a rape victim in vegas.
Dubai is also at the center of the international sex trade despite supposedly harsh laws and punishments for prostitution. It's a magnet for the high dollar escort business entertaining wealthy men from all over the Middle East who are flush with money from the oil industry.
But the cost of sex services is expensive and for the wealthy, not ordinary local and foreign men.
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