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Dubai’s migrant laborers protest for higher wages

Hundreds of migrant workers in Dubai took to the streets on Monday, demanding higher wages and overtime pay from their employer, the company that built the emirate’s landmark sail-shaped Gulf shore hotel.

The rally of Asian laborers employed by Dubai’s development giant Al Habtoor Engineering Enterprises LLC was the first public display of labor discontent since the former boomtown was hit by the economic crisis last year.

The laborers, now working on building an extension of a shopping mall in Dubai’s Diera District and a convention center in the city’s Jabal Ali industrial zone, said their pay wasn’t enough to survive on and support their families back home in Southeast Asia.

“We are demanding overtime [pay] or a raise in salaries,” said a protester from Pakistan who identified himself as Mohammed al-Raoub, although workers on strike in the emirates are usually reluctant to give their real names, fearing reprisals.

He said he earned 700 dirhams (US$190) a month and had worked overtime without extra pay.

“I can barely manage to survive and send money to my family,” he said.

Al Habtoor representatives declined to comment on the workers’ protest when contacted by reporters.

Rights groups have long criticized labor abuse in oil-rich Dubai, which has depended on low-wage Asian migrants to build its skyscrapers and artificial islands to attract tourists and accommodate multinational companies and expatriates from Europe and Asia.

The Emirates recently took steps to improve workers’ living conditions and ensure regular monthly payments, but low and often delayed paychecks remain a problem for the Asian migrants, whose complaints have not resonated with cash-strapped employers in debt-sunk Dubai.

The country’s WAM news agency said on Monday the Ministry of Labor “sent an inspection team to a contracting company whose workers stopped working,” but did not identify the name of the firm.

The report said inspectors “found workers complaining about an increase in work hours despite the government’s recommendations to reduce them.”

WAM quoted the acting general manager of the Labor Ministry, Humaid bin Dimas, as saying: “the company’s records show it has been paying salaries on time.”

He said the workers “did not respond positively to the official’s request to come to the ministry’s offices to follow up on their demands.”

The plight of migrant workers in Dubai has worsened since the economic downturn, which has led to the cancelation or delay of dozens of development projects. Fewer workers are now needed and unemployment is rising.

Al Habtoor Engineering is part of Al Habtoor Leighton Group, a joint venture between one of the Emirates’ most prominent merchant families and Leighton Holdings, Australia’s biggest construction company.

Since its establishment in 1970, Al Habtoor Engineering became a leading construction and engineering company in the Mideast, building hotels, residential and commercial towers, universities, shopping malls and airports across the region.

Their projects include the Dubai International Airport and the city’s two landmark hotels: the sail-shaped Burj Al Arab hotel and the neighboring wave-shaped Jumeirah Beach Hotel.

The company is currently building a branch of the Paris Sorbonne University in Abu Dhabi.
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