Slaves in the UAE
C. M. Reinhardt | 11.Mar.10
“When two people meet, something good should result for a third.”
-The Lubavitcher Rebbe, quoting his father-in-law Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn
Work takes me many places, most recently to the United Arab Emirates, a small country on the Arabian Peninsula tucked just down the road from the intersection of oil and war. With the country's new wealth, most nationals enjoy the luxuries of the standard five and six-bedroom sprawling walled-off villas attended by a staff of help including a driver, nanny and housekeepers. These compounds become buzzing, isolated hubs for independently operating families, leaving little reason to reach out to foreigners, except to employ them. Our company-provided villa was no exception. We were surprised with en suite rooms and two full-time house attendants caring for the oversized mass of marble, stucco and ever-present sand. With two staff for four expatriates, it became clearer why it is estimated expats in the country outweigh Emirati by numbers of four or five to one.
One of our house attendants came to the UAE from Bangladesh in search of better-paying work. Despite our language barrier, as we became friendly, quick, private conversations revealed that he borrowed money to come to the UAE for a job that promised to pay four times what he might make in Bangladesh. When he arrived, he was put in a post that paid him a quarter of that; his wages if he had stayed in his home country. His passport was taken away, and he was told if he had a problem with the situation, it was just that, his problem. My new friend, Hafiz*, is a modern-day slave, trapped in the UAE. With no substantial income, no network of family or friends, no resources to return home and no passport, if somehow he did return home to his family, he would most likely be jailed for his inability to pay back the enormous sum of money he borrowed to take this “opportunity”. As it turns out, this is a very common story in the UAE. Some estimates suggest three million laborers are living as slaves in the UAE alone. With numbers like that, how do we start to unpack and assess how we can affect change?
Many theories explore reasons for our varied abilities as humans to show compassion. One contemporary idea, by Shankar Vedantam, suggests that the human brain has not evolved to understand mass volumes of human tragedy, since only recently we have been networked to the rest of the world to understand such large numbers. As he explains in his new book The Hidden Brain, Vedantam suggests we have a hard time expressing empathy for any number over one person. The intimacy created by putting a face and a voice to one person's suffering is the easiest key to unlock the door to compassion from our minds. In fact, Vedantam suggests specifically that we do not show 20 times the human compassion when we hear of 20 people trapped in a situation, we actually feel less. Our brains are not wired to consider the mass of tragedy when we lose a visceral link via a name, a face, a personality. Hafiz's story and broken spirit becomes that essential singular voice, humming a collective and shared story of millions of others.
The slaves in the UAE are not hidden away in factories and brothels. They are out on the roads. In fact, they are building them. As Ben Anderson illuminates in The Slaves of Dubai, they are the construction workers wearing bright blue jumpsuits, making them even more visible than the drivers, the personal attendants and nannies who are responsible for the 'standard of living' that attracts many expats to the UAE. The jumpsuits make the workers impossible to miss, but paradoxically hard to see. Companies using these laborers play a shell game with them; transporting the laborers directly to and from camps and construction zones in large white unmarked buses. With language barriers, lack of independent transportation, 14 hour work days, omnipresent class issues and discrimination, workers are rarely seen outside of the construction zones they work in; once off the buses and inside the camps, they are not seen at all.
Using secret cameras, Anderson exposes the filthy, squalid living conditions in the camps, matched in its potency by the misery and hopelessness dwelling within each individual. Both conditions are as pervasive as the stench from the raw sewage of non-working toilets. Having seen these ubiquitous labor camps from the roads in the UAE, I was surprised he got in, and even more surprised he got out without incident. The camps are strategically placed on the outskirts of town and are built like secured barracks, with long access roads and high fencing. These features, with the addition of gate guards, keep laborers away from the daily interactions where others might be compelled to interact with them. Doing so would give voices to people who in Anderson's words are “largely not there in the first place”.
Even Anderson, who spent months infiltrating the camps doesn't have solutions for the systematic human rights violations he captured on tape. In a sense, we are in the basic stages of the transfer of information; exposing ourselves to a situation most of us are unaware even exists. To an onlooker, blue jumpsuits could mean unionized labor, or legitimately documented and compensated construction workers. Our spirits know better. In the cities, domestic laborers in contact with the rest of society are routinely instructed to not engage Westerners in any capacity other than the transaction at hand. Our souls know these empty exchanges are not compassionate, meaningful interactions. Daily, across the globe, we all have tremendous opportunities to help a third person by making small talk lead to much bigger and more meaningful talk.
My effort to bring Hafiz's situation to the person in charge at my company was met with a speech from the other side of the desk. “This is your first time working in the Middle East. It is important to know that some people here are treated like property, and it is considered an insult to try and take property away from a owner.” In order to make him an employee of any company, Hafiz's owner would have be willing to “sell” him for some bogus price. He would get his passport back, in theory, and then free to become a legitimate employee of the company with the ability to make a living that would allow him to send remittances home to support his family; the reason he came in the first place. As it stands, companies look the other way while they hire what amounts to temps from an agency, and they pay less for them than they would if they were actual employees of the company. From an economic standpoint, there is little reason to acknowledge and fix the situation.
To the credit of my colleague, he did speak to Hafiz's owner. Hafiz found me after that discussion, who was made privy to it by his owner visiting our villa to tell him to “stop talking”. The following week, he was moved to another villa. This situation was exactly what I feared, making life harder for Hafiz by trying to make things better for him.
For so many people suffering the same fate of human trafficking, (The US Trafficking in Persons report estimates 30 million human beings are trafficked around the world annually) and the individual stories being so similar, on a spiritual level a stage for this collective voice seems imminent. In meditation, we can focus on the idea that when we chant our mantra, we are tuning into the vibrations sustained by other people meditating elsewhere in the world, creating a global vibration of a common energy. With so many voices living the same story, imagine if we tuned in to that vibration, and by one person speaking to another, we could help a third with options, choices and skills. Meaningful results from right speech and compassion suddenly become as plausible as the jobs promising four times their current salaries that separated them from their homes and families.
Imagine if the Lubavitcher Rebbe's words came true, that everyone we met and spoke to was a good meeting for a third. What can be possible if that became true one half of the time? One quarter of the time? Just once? Imagine if we each take a moment in our daily lives to research what we buy before we buy it, and decide the transaction is good for the third person who makes the item. If we take the time to tune into human suffering and discuss it with another, imagine that conversation benefiting a third person by creating the spark of a conversation suggesting this situation is wrong, and can be changed.
Globalization has made people we have never met our neighbors. It is because of this we must draw near the idea that even though we cannot see them, we must act as though they are right next to us. The world economy and its labor presents a tremendous opportunity, with right action, to solve global problems. When we interact with the intention to help a third person, we can soon be helping anywhere in the world. Imagine if this piece of writing speaks to you, and together we help a third. Where in the world might that take us?
* Note:
-The Lubavitcher Rebbe, quoting his father-in-law Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn
Work takes me many places, most recently to the United Arab Emirates, a small country on the Arabian Peninsula tucked just down the road from the intersection of oil and war. With the country's new wealth, most nationals enjoy the luxuries of the standard five and six-bedroom sprawling walled-off villas attended by a staff of help including a driver, nanny and housekeepers. These compounds become buzzing, isolated hubs for independently operating families, leaving little reason to reach out to foreigners, except to employ them. Our company-provided villa was no exception. We were surprised with en suite rooms and two full-time house attendants caring for the oversized mass of marble, stucco and ever-present sand. With two staff for four expatriates, it became clearer why it is estimated expats in the country outweigh Emirati by numbers of four or five to one.
One of our house attendants came to the UAE from Bangladesh in search of better-paying work. Despite our language barrier, as we became friendly, quick, private conversations revealed that he borrowed money to come to the UAE for a job that promised to pay four times what he might make in Bangladesh. When he arrived, he was put in a post that paid him a quarter of that; his wages if he had stayed in his home country. His passport was taken away, and he was told if he had a problem with the situation, it was just that, his problem. My new friend, Hafiz*, is a modern-day slave, trapped in the UAE. With no substantial income, no network of family or friends, no resources to return home and no passport, if somehow he did return home to his family, he would most likely be jailed for his inability to pay back the enormous sum of money he borrowed to take this “opportunity”. As it turns out, this is a very common story in the UAE. Some estimates suggest three million laborers are living as slaves in the UAE alone. With numbers like that, how do we start to unpack and assess how we can affect change?
Many theories explore reasons for our varied abilities as humans to show compassion. One contemporary idea, by Shankar Vedantam, suggests that the human brain has not evolved to understand mass volumes of human tragedy, since only recently we have been networked to the rest of the world to understand such large numbers. As he explains in his new book The Hidden Brain, Vedantam suggests we have a hard time expressing empathy for any number over one person. The intimacy created by putting a face and a voice to one person's suffering is the easiest key to unlock the door to compassion from our minds. In fact, Vedantam suggests specifically that we do not show 20 times the human compassion when we hear of 20 people trapped in a situation, we actually feel less. Our brains are not wired to consider the mass of tragedy when we lose a visceral link via a name, a face, a personality. Hafiz's story and broken spirit becomes that essential singular voice, humming a collective and shared story of millions of others.
The slaves in the UAE are not hidden away in factories and brothels. They are out on the roads. In fact, they are building them. As Ben Anderson illuminates in The Slaves of Dubai, they are the construction workers wearing bright blue jumpsuits, making them even more visible than the drivers, the personal attendants and nannies who are responsible for the 'standard of living' that attracts many expats to the UAE. The jumpsuits make the workers impossible to miss, but paradoxically hard to see. Companies using these laborers play a shell game with them; transporting the laborers directly to and from camps and construction zones in large white unmarked buses. With language barriers, lack of independent transportation, 14 hour work days, omnipresent class issues and discrimination, workers are rarely seen outside of the construction zones they work in; once off the buses and inside the camps, they are not seen at all.
Using secret cameras, Anderson exposes the filthy, squalid living conditions in the camps, matched in its potency by the misery and hopelessness dwelling within each individual. Both conditions are as pervasive as the stench from the raw sewage of non-working toilets. Having seen these ubiquitous labor camps from the roads in the UAE, I was surprised he got in, and even more surprised he got out without incident. The camps are strategically placed on the outskirts of town and are built like secured barracks, with long access roads and high fencing. These features, with the addition of gate guards, keep laborers away from the daily interactions where others might be compelled to interact with them. Doing so would give voices to people who in Anderson's words are “largely not there in the first place”.
Even Anderson, who spent months infiltrating the camps doesn't have solutions for the systematic human rights violations he captured on tape. In a sense, we are in the basic stages of the transfer of information; exposing ourselves to a situation most of us are unaware even exists. To an onlooker, blue jumpsuits could mean unionized labor, or legitimately documented and compensated construction workers. Our spirits know better. In the cities, domestic laborers in contact with the rest of society are routinely instructed to not engage Westerners in any capacity other than the transaction at hand. Our souls know these empty exchanges are not compassionate, meaningful interactions. Daily, across the globe, we all have tremendous opportunities to help a third person by making small talk lead to much bigger and more meaningful talk.
My effort to bring Hafiz's situation to the person in charge at my company was met with a speech from the other side of the desk. “This is your first time working in the Middle East. It is important to know that some people here are treated like property, and it is considered an insult to try and take property away from a owner.” In order to make him an employee of any company, Hafiz's owner would have be willing to “sell” him for some bogus price. He would get his passport back, in theory, and then free to become a legitimate employee of the company with the ability to make a living that would allow him to send remittances home to support his family; the reason he came in the first place. As it stands, companies look the other way while they hire what amounts to temps from an agency, and they pay less for them than they would if they were actual employees of the company. From an economic standpoint, there is little reason to acknowledge and fix the situation.
To the credit of my colleague, he did speak to Hafiz's owner. Hafiz found me after that discussion, who was made privy to it by his owner visiting our villa to tell him to “stop talking”. The following week, he was moved to another villa. This situation was exactly what I feared, making life harder for Hafiz by trying to make things better for him.
For so many people suffering the same fate of human trafficking, (The US Trafficking in Persons report estimates 30 million human beings are trafficked around the world annually) and the individual stories being so similar, on a spiritual level a stage for this collective voice seems imminent. In meditation, we can focus on the idea that when we chant our mantra, we are tuning into the vibrations sustained by other people meditating elsewhere in the world, creating a global vibration of a common energy. With so many voices living the same story, imagine if we tuned in to that vibration, and by one person speaking to another, we could help a third with options, choices and skills. Meaningful results from right speech and compassion suddenly become as plausible as the jobs promising four times their current salaries that separated them from their homes and families.
Imagine if the Lubavitcher Rebbe's words came true, that everyone we met and spoke to was a good meeting for a third. What can be possible if that became true one half of the time? One quarter of the time? Just once? Imagine if we each take a moment in our daily lives to research what we buy before we buy it, and decide the transaction is good for the third person who makes the item. If we take the time to tune into human suffering and discuss it with another, imagine that conversation benefiting a third person by creating the spark of a conversation suggesting this situation is wrong, and can be changed.
Globalization has made people we have never met our neighbors. It is because of this we must draw near the idea that even though we cannot see them, we must act as though they are right next to us. The world economy and its labor presents a tremendous opportunity, with right action, to solve global problems. When we interact with the intention to help a third person, we can soon be helping anywhere in the world. Imagine if this piece of writing speaks to you, and together we help a third. Where in the world might that take us?
* Note:
Hafiz is the fictional name of a real man. His real name has been changed for this article as he still lives in fear of his owner.
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 COMMENTS: 2
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1. Posted on 09.May.10 From: ALAMZEB KHAN
Dear LINDA ECKHARDT,
Don't be prjudiced and narrow minded.It is true you must have got through bitter experiences but it doesn't mean to give them severe punishment as you demand for them.Calm down your anger over them.
2. Posted on 11.Mar.10 From: Linda Eckhardt
The more things change, the more they stay the same. The only answer I know to this problem is to stop buying middle eastern products, so that means only buying gasoline from companies who bring it up from S. America. Doable, but who knows what those folks are doing to workers? argh.
Actually I stopped buying middle eastern gasoline a while back because I feel that we -- the privileged Americans -- are also hijacked.
Leave 'em on the desert. Let 'em eat sand.