The End of Dubai's Injustices?

One of the possible outcomes from the collapse of Dubai will be that many labourers who are employed on the vast construction projects in the city will no longer have to live as modern day slaves.

Reportedly a third have already left the city since the recession began. Others have not been paid for months but cannot leave because their employers often confiscated their passports/visas on arrival. Yet it's the sweat - and often the lives - of these people who made Dubai the fastest growing city in the world.

The Church in the Gulf has been concerned about this gross injustice for years. I tried to relay the extent of the problem in an article I wrote last year for the Catholic Herald.

But the problem for the labourers is that even if they can go back to their homes in southern Asia, they are still likely to remain in poverty. To escape the hardships of their own countries and earn a (relatively) decent wage to send home was, for many, one of the main reasons they chose to leave their homelands for the Gulf.

Photo - A typical scene on a Dubai motorway, June 2008: A limousine Hummer, and a non-air conditioned bus taking labourers to work.