5 ms·

What do you think the alternatives should be? Should Indian and Pakistani companies pay more to Indian and Pakistani workers they bring to Dubai? Should they le

• rosndo 4y ago
  Yep, it’s sort of hilarious to see us rich Westerners criticizing work conditions in Dubai while our countries simply make it impossible for these same people to get visas to work in the West. UAE is doing more to improve the lives of these people than the West ever has, even if it doesn’t look all that pretty. It’s very unfortunate that photos of denied visa applications will never evoke the same response.
  • lotsofpulp 4y ago
    Mind boggling that someone could equate slavery via confiscation of passports to denying people immigration visas.
    • rosndo 4y ago
      If someone confiscates your passport in Dubai you can have it back within 24 hours by just calling MOHRE at 80060. It is illegal to do this, enforcement is pretty aggressive. As to denial of visas? At least the UAE offers these people a chance at a better life, Western countries give them nothing. A slight QOL improvement is much better than none.
      • munk-a 4y ago
        If it's illegal to confiscate passports in Dubai why is it so widespread and commonplace? Is it like smoking MJ in most states - it's "illegal" but unless cops want a reason to arrest you they'll just ignore you and keep on driving?
        • rosndo 4y ago
          It’s not nearly as widespread in 2022 as you might like to think. To get a low-skilled work visa in Dubai you have to sit through an hour long lecture explaining these rights, including what to do if your employer takes your passport. You are advised to not give your passport to your employer except to have your visa stamped, and then immediately demand it back. This country is modernizing very rapidly, things that were true 5 years ago are often not true anymore.
          • munk-a 4y ago
            My understanding of the situation on the ground might be a bit out of date then, a lot of my information about Dubai comes from pre-pandemic.
  • rdtwo 4y ago
    They trick the workers and then enslave then. Often then employer withholds and does not pay wages. It’s not an opportunity to have a better life if they don’t actually get paid
    • rosndo 4y ago
      You say this like it’s the norm and that businesses don’t get penalized if they do this. That’s simply not true.
• viraptor 4y ago
  We can definitely say people should not work like slaves in Dubai and that it would be great if the conditions were better in their original countries. I'm drawing the line at the confiscated passports, threat of jail and terrible living conditions - if you can't safely leave your work, you're a slave. It doesn't matter what the alternative at your home is.
• lovich 4y ago
  The slavery calls are less about the low wages and more about things like workers having their passports confiscated or being abused/killed by their employers. But what do I know? Maybe because I’m in America I can’t call being forced to work and unable to leave slavery cause it’s a second hand opinion. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
  • Aspos 4y ago
    When talking to flat-earthers giving them logical arguments and more information is pointless as they will keep brushing off info that contradicts their world-view and will keep finding info that supports it. The same story about this whole Dubai-slavery thing. No one confiscates passports, it is a nonsense. But what can I tell a person in America to make them doubt ideas they fixate to? Now go ahead and google up that one case when somebody did confiscate a passport a few decades ago and extrapolate this to all the millions of workers in UAE. You see what I mean?
    • apohn 4y ago
      >No one confiscates passports, it is a nonsense. Confiscate is probably too extreme a word, but when I lived in UAE many employers held onto (e.g. in the office safe) their employees passports. At some point I think the government realized this could be abused, and then there was an centralized office (at least in Jebel Ali, it was different in Abu Dhabi) where your employer asked you to have them hold your passport. To get your passport you had to get a letter from your employer saying it was okay for you to get it. Or, in my case, I left my job and got it back. Personally, I hated the fact that I had to ask my employer for my passport when I got accepted into Grad school in the US and had to tell my employer I needed it for a few days to get a visa. I never questioned the legality of it though, and according to this it's not legal for employers to force you to hand over your passport. https://gulfnews.com/uae/find-out-if-your-employer-is-authorised-to-withhold-your-passport-1.76097893 https://gulfnews.com/uae/find-out-if-your-employer-is-author... But like most legal things, when you are on a work visa you are scared of anything that might harm that. So you don't challenge or ask questions. It's pretty common for people on H1B to stay at an job they hate even though changing jobs on H1B is supposed to be easy. I certainly stayed at a bad job longer than I wanted to until my green card process hit a certain point. I think legally I could have changed earlier, but the company immigration attorney certainly gaslighted me on many things, and I was just too scared to take any risks with visa stuff. It's easy for a company to exploit that fear.
• FabHK 4y ago
  I agree that many workers go to the UAE (and Saudi Arabia and other places) because they can get a much better deal there than they could get at home. However, it is also true that too many of those migrant workers are then treated atrociously, with little legal recourse, and with a casual chauvinism and racism that far exceeds what is often labeled "racism" in progressive societies. And that is particularly grating given that those oil-rich countries could afford not only fancy buildings and museums, but also decent labour standards. > Should Indian and Pakistani companies pay more to Indian and Pakistani workers they bring to Dubai? Yes indeed. > Who do you think should dictate how much more Indian companies should pay [...]? As usual, the government of the country they operate in. In this case, the UAE governments. It would probably mean somewhat more expensive buildings for the UAE, and somewhat less profits for said Indian and Pakistani companies.
  • Aspos 4y ago
    So a guy lives in what can be best described as a "pit", makes an equivalent of, say, $200/m. Among many contenders wins job in Dubai, moves to a company-provided, airconditioned camp (built by no other that Hughes, who builds camps for Exxon, BP and others around the world), eats company-provided food, wears company-provided closes, watches company-provided TV, gets shuttled to and from work for free and makes $600/m. Works his ass off to stay employed, obviously. In a few years he may save up enough to marry any girl in the village. With some luck he may be given a chance to learn welding. If so, he will buy a new Hero Honda, or, even better, an automobile. What should change in this scenario so you would stop calling this a "slavery"?
    • alexvoda 4y ago
      Be provided an exit at any point. If the worker deems the actual(not advertised) working conditions unacceptable, they should be enabled to return home. Otherwise they are defacto captive, i.e. a slave.
      • Aspos 4y ago
        That's right. Employees are free to go and can head to the airport at any moment. Employer must arrange and pay for the departure within a month. If it does not happen, government arranges the exit, pays the travel expenses and deducts the money from company's escrow account.
• apohn 4y ago
  I know you're going to get downvoted to hell, but I'm going to give you an upvote. Many people who have enough leisure time to spend on HN and Reddit just don't understand the conditions many people grow up in. Not just India and Pakistan, but Philippines, Indonesia, and all the countries where you see economic migrants to any gulf country. Imagine growing up in unbelievable poverty with no educational opportunities or support, and with the external and internal pressure to financially support your siblings, parents, family and so they can survive and not just repeat the cycle you were born into. It's an insane situation, and the only solution humans seem to have come up with is to encourage people with money buy stuff that's made by people who cannot afford that same stuff. In one country it's tall buildings, in another it's phones and t-shirts.
  • munk-a 4y ago
    I mean - that's sort of the ultra-capitalist creed right? It's impossible for us to solve poverty in any manner other than exporting work to make cheap t-shirts and since slavery is close to the same level of suffering it must be alright? Global wealth inequality issues are certainly not easy to solve, but we don't just need to shrug and say "I guess that's the way the world needs to work" - there is an extreme amount of excess in western countries, we've got several people who have literally nothing better to do with their money than launch private rockets into space for PR so I don't think it's fair to say "it's near- slavery or t-shirts". As the wealthiest nation on earth and the never-sated consumer that drives most of the world's economy America is in a position where it can demand better working conditions, it can say t-shirts at walmart can't reasonably cost 5$... but it is choosing not to do so. And, with all that said, the UAE in it's (hopefully now in the past) passport seizing days was still far worse.
    • apohn 4y ago
      >And, with all that said, the UAE in it's (hopefully now in the past) passport seizing days was still far worse. Honestly, when I lived in UAE I had to submit my passport to a centralized system that held the passports of people who worked in that commercial area. To this day I don't know if I had to legally give them my passport or if my employer simply encouraged me to do it and presented it to me as as if I didn't have a choice. A few weeks ago I had to take a sick family member to the emergency room here in the US at 3AM because they vomited blood. All medical resources online said it could not wait till morning as it could be internal bleeding. They were given an X-ray, an external exam by a nurse and a doctor, and told that it was a mild adverse reaction to some common medication and to swap to something else. Nothing to worry about. Time from leaving home to back home was 75 minutes, tops. Bill was $3500. My employer only offers HDHP options so a lot of that is on me once the insurance company and hospital are done playing their stupid games. I think all employers in UAE are required to provide health-insurance. Prior to that, everybody there legally had governmental healthcare, but that has changed as medical costs have risen private insurance has become an option. Thankfully I have insurance and I work in tech. It hits my budget and stings, I can afford to pay it. But if I didn't have health insurance and had family in my home country who depended on me sending money every month, that bill would have wrecked my life. I realize passports versus medical benefits is not a sensible comparison at all. Nobody seems to write stories about how governmental treatment of migrant workers in UAE has improved a lot over the last 2 decades. There's tons of room to improve, but it has gotten better.
• munk-a 4y ago
  An affluent country like Dubai could afford to treat these workers a lot better locally than they may be treated in their homelands. I reject the premise that we live in a world of unregulated capitalism where free-markets force us all to engage in a race to the bottom when it comes to working conditions, and the modern world also rejects that with a plethora of examples: how can US workers who demand trivial things like sane working hours and health care possibly compete with people overseas who can do the same work while being paid peanuts - it's because we as a society can demand that. The people of the UAE could similarly demand that labourers be paid better and receive better treatment - it's not an unavoidable economic outcome that near slavery exists, it's a choice.
  • Aspos 4y ago
    Great. So Dubai should force Indian companies pay their Indian workers more, but Indian companies in India should not be forced to, right? How would you justify this? And what if I ask you to apply the same logic to H1B?
    • munk-a 4y ago
      In Dubai, like America, the companies should be forced to treat domestic workers fairly. It'd be really swell if those companies treated workers fairly in India as well and the population of Dubai could put pressure on India to improve working conditions but that's a sovereignty and economic question. I think it'd be really swell if standards of living across the globe were a lot more equalized, but that's not the world we live in. We can fix our own back yard but other nations are blocked by different base standards of living - we can influence that by, for instance, preferring to buy products from companies that treat overseas labour more fairly which will slowly transfer wealth and raise up those well off or, if you're bezos rich, I guess you could just try and wave a magic wand... but there just isn't enough domestic GDP to support higher wages in some countries.
  • MomoXenosaga 4y ago
    In my country the minimum wage is the same for everyone regardless of nationality. That would immediately fix the whole issue.