The Burj Khalifa, now the world’s tallest building, is two thousand seven hundred and seventeen feet high—more than a thousand feet taller than its nearest rival and roughly twice as high as the Empire State Building. Photograph by Robert Polidori.
Erecting the tallest building in the world is a pursuit both pointless and exhilarating. Someone will always build a bigger one, but that doesn’t diminish the intense allure of height, which can make a building famous whether or not there is anything else to recommend it. Frank Lloyd Wright, who never much liked cities, understood this perfectly when, in 1956, he unveiled a fantasy known as the Mile High Illinois, a five-hundred-and-twenty-eight-story tower that he proposed for downtown Chicago, overlooking Lake Michigan. An elegant spire, pencil-thin, it was a cavalier dismissal of the gaggle of boxy office buildings that were turning most of America’s urban centers into a blur. Although it was unbuildable, it grabbed more headlines than any real building could have, and it gave the illusion that Wright was in command of a type of building that he had always disdained.
The Burj Khalifa, in Dubai—the new holder of the title of World’s Tallest Building—is no less extravagant a media gesture. Unlike Wright’s design, to which it bears a startling resemblance, this building is very real—all one hundred and sixty stories (or two thousand seven hundred and seventeen feet) of it. For decades, skyscrapers have been topping each other in only small increments: Kuala Lumpur’s Petronas Towers (one thousand four hundred and eighty-two feet) are thirty-two feet taller than Chicago’s Sears Tower (or Willis Tower, as it is now called); the Shanghai World Financial Center is about a hundred and thirty feet taller than the Petronas Towers; Taipei 101, in Taiwan, is fifty feet taller than the Shanghai tower; and so on. But the Burj Khalifa represents a quantum leap over these midgets. Even if you put the Chrysler Building on top of the Empire State Building, that still wouldn’t equal its height.
As with most super-tall buildings, function is hardly the point of the Burj Khalifa. Certainly, it’s not as if there weren’t enough land to build on in Dubai, or any need for more office or residential space, after a decade-long construction spree that makes the excesses of Florida look almost prudent. Dubai doesn’t have as much oil as some other emirates, and saw a way to make itself rich by turning an expanse of sand beside the Arabian Gulf into an all-in-one business center, resort, and haven for flight capital. When the tower was first planned, by Emaar Properties, a real-estate entity partly owned by the government, it was called Burj Dubai, which means Dubai Tower—just in case anyone might have missed the fact that the world’s most high-flying, come-from-nowhere city was also home to the world’s tallest building. But, while the building was going up, growth in Dubai ground to a halt, leaving much of the new real estate unoccupied and unsold. This past November, Dubai ran out of money, was unable to make payments on sixty billion dollars’ worth of debt, and had to be rescued by a ten-billion-dollar bailout from Abu Dhabi, the conservative, oil-rich emirate next door. At the building’s opening, Dubai announced that the skyscraper would bear the name of Abu Dhabi’s ruler, Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed al-Nahyan. It’s as if Goldman Sachs were to rename its new headquarters the Warren Buffett Tower.
Dubai is unlike any other city, but imagine a cross between Hong Kong and Las Vegas that tries to operate as if it were Switzerland, and you begin to get the idea. There are more glitzy glass towers than you can count, many of them put up not so much to house people or businesses as to give to rich Indians, Russians, Iranians, and Southeast Asians a place to park some cash away from nosy local governments. Given the general level of tackiness on display—not to mention the often appalling living conditions of Dubai’s armies of migrant construction workers—the Burj Khalifa should be an easy building to loathe, and the embarrassing way that its completion coincided with the near-meltdown of Dubai’s economy makes it easy to mock as a symbol of hubris. And yet the Burj Khalifa turns out to be far more sophisticated, even subtle, than one might expect. The tower is a shimmering silver needle, its delicacy as startling as its height. You would think that anything this huge would dominate the sky, but the Burj Khalifa punctuates it instead.
The tower was designed by the architect Adrian Smith and the engineer William Baker, both of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. (Smith left the firm during construction, and Baker and his colleagues George Efstathiou and Eric Tomich saw the project through to completion.) Skidmore has built plenty of iconic skyscrapers before. A generation ago, its architect-engineer team Bruce Graham and Fazlur Khan revolutionized skyscraper design with the “bundled tube” structure of the Sears Tower. The Burj doesn’t use bundled tubes, though to look at it from the outside you might think it did. From a distance it looks like a cluster of variously sized metal rods, the tallest at the center. The building has a Y-shaped floor plan, with three lobes buttressing a hexagonal central core, which houses the elevators. The structure provides a lot of exterior walls with windows overlooking the Gulf and the desert. The first twenty or so floors are fairly bulky, giving the building a wide stance on the ground, but as it rises there is a spiralling sequence of setbacks. By the time you get about a third of the way to the top, the tower has gracefully metamorphosed into a slender building, and it keeps on narrowing until only a central section remains.
One advantage of this configuration is that, because the building’s shape varies at each level, wind cannot create an organized vortex around it, and stress on the structure is thereby reduced. The setbacks, the Skidmore team likes to say, “confuse the wind.” But the design has an aesthetic virtue, too, giving the Burj Khalifa, for all its twenty-first-century ingenuity, a lyrical profile that calls to mind the skyscrapers of eighty or ninety years ago. The defining towers of the New York sky line, at least before the Second World War, were skinny compared with today’s skyscrapers, and their vertical lines gave intense visual pleasure. We’ve sacrificed all that for efficiency: office tenants today want lots of horizontal space, which means huge, open floors and stocky, inelegant towers. The Burj Khalifa has three million square feet of interior space, which sounds like a lot, but in fact it is four hundred thousand square feet less than the Shanghai World Financial Center, which is fifty-nine stories shorter. Even the MetLife Building, less than a third of the height of the Burj, has 2.4 million square feet. The Burj Khalifa can afford not to care about square footage because, notwithstanding a few small, high-priced office suites on the narrow floors at the top, it isn’t an office building. Most of the building is given over to condominium apartments. (At the bottom, there will be a hotel designed and managed by Giorgio Armani.) The decision to make most of the building residential speaks volumes about the extent to which Dubai’s economy has been based on the sale of condominiums to absentee owners for investment. Whether or not the decision to fill the tower with apartments made economic sense, it was certainly the right thing to do architecturally. The profile of the Burj has a magnetism that is lacking in almost every other super-tall building of our time. Furthermore, the tower doesn’t indulge in the showy engineering tricks that have become so common today; it doesn’t get wider as it rises, or lean to one side, or appear to be made of broken shards. There is something appealing about a building that relies on the most advanced engineering but doesn’t flaunt it.
The Burj Khalifa, like most super-tall skyscrapers, looks best from afar, and, certainly, it can’t do much to mitigate the real horror of Dubai, which isn’t the fact that most of the towers look gaudy on the sky line but that they are wretched at street level. This is a city that has grown with utter hostility to the idea of the street. The main commercial thoroughfare, Sheikh Zayed Road, lined with skyscrapers, is a twelve-lane highway. It’s impossible to get anywhere here without a car, and there is no place to walk except inside a mall. The city is completing a transit system, and there are some strikingly handsome, glass-enclosed elevated stations, but it is an idealized version of a Western-style metro, dropped onto an urban plan designed solely for the automobile; it’s hard to believe that it will make much difference. The biggest group of pedestrians I saw in five days was on the promenade outside the Dubai Mall, where people gather to look across an artificial lagoon at the Burj Khalifa while watching fountains dance to Middle Eastern music. To them, the Burj is a backdrop for a show.
Then again, almost everything in Dubai is a kind of visual spectacle intended to make you gawk. You can’t justify the Burj Khalifa by the standards that apply to most commercial buildings. But that’s nothing new. Buildings put up to garner titles like “the world’s tallest” or “the world’s second-tallest” are usually erected in cities that have reached a critical juncture in their maturity, and which want to assert their position for the first time on the world stage. The Woolworth Building, the Chrysler Building, and the Empire State Building, each of which was the world’s tallest for a time, were all put up to announce the primacy of their city to the world, and they succeeded. That’s just what Asian and Middle Eastern countries are trying to do now. You don’t build this kind of skyscraper to house people, or to give tourists a view, or even, necessarily, to make a profit. You do it to make sure the world knows who you are.
On a recent Tuesday morning, single mom Tammy DePew Smith woke up in her tidy Florida townhouse in time to shuttle her oldest daughter, a high school freshman, to the 6:11 a.m. bus. At 6:40 she was at the desk in her bedroom, starting her first shift of the day with LiveOps, a Santa Clara (Calif.) provider of call-center workers for everyone from Eastman Kodak (EK) and Pizza Hut (YUM) to infomercial behemoth Tristar Products. She's paid by the minute—25 cents—but only for the time she's actually on the phone with customers.
By 7:40, Smith had grossed $15. But there wasn't much time to reflect on her early morning productivity; the next child had to be roused from bed, fed, and put onto the school bus. Somehow she managed to squeeze three more shifts into her day, pausing only to homeschool her 7-year-old son, make dinner, and do the bedtime routine. "I tell my kids, unless somebody is bleeding or dying, don't mess with me."
As an independent agent, Smith has no health insurance, no retirement benefits, no sick days, no vacation, no severance, and no access to unemployment insurance. But in recession-ravaged Ormond Beach, she's considered lucky. She has had more or less steady work since she signed on with LiveOps in October 2006. "LiveOps was a lifesaver for me," she says.
You know American workers are in bad shape when a low-paying, no-benefits job is considered a sweet deal. Their situation isn't likely to improve soon; some economists predict it will be years, not months, before employees regain any semblance of bargaining power. That's because this recession's unusual ferocity has accelerated trends—including offshoring, automation, the decline of labor unions' influence, new management techniques, and regulatory changes—that already had been eroding workers' economic standing.
The forecast for the next five to 10 years: more of the same, with paltry pay gains, worsening working conditions, and little job security. Right on up to the C-suite, more jobs will be freelance and temporary, and even seemingly permanent positions will be at greater risk. "When I hear people talk about temp vs. permanent jobs, I laugh," says Barry Asin, chief analyst at the Los Altos (Calif.) labor-analysis firm Staffing Industry Analysts. "The idea that any job is permanent has been well proven not to be true." As Kelly Services (KELYA) CEO Carl Camden puts it: "We're all temps now."
Peter Cappelli, director of the Center for Human Resources at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, says the brutal recession has prompted more companies to create just-in-time labor forces that can be turned on and off like a spigot. "Employers are trying to get rid of all fixed costs," Cappelli says. "First they did it with employment benefits. Now they're doing it with the jobs themselves. Everything is variable." That means companies hold all the power, and "all the risks are pushed on to employees."
The era of the disposable worker has big implications both for employees and employers. For workers, research shows that chronic unemployment and underemployment cause lasting damage: Older people who lose jobs are often forced into premature retirement, while the careers of younger people are stunted by their early detachment from the working world. Even 15 years out of school, people who graduated from college in a recession earn 2.5% less than if they had graduated in more prosperous times, research has shown.
Diminishing job security is also widening the gap between the highest- and lowest-paid workers. At the top, people with sought-after skills can earn more by jumping from assignment to assignment than they can by sticking with one company. But for the least educated, who have no special skills to sell, the new deal for labor offers nothing but downside.
Employers prize flexibility, of course. But if they aren't careful they can wind up with an alienated, dispirited workforce. A Conference Board survey released on Jan. 5 found that only 45% of workers surveyed were satisfied with their jobs, the lowest in 22 years of polling. Poor morale can devastate performance. After making deep staff cuts following the subprime implosion, UBS (UBS), Credit Suisse (CS), and American Express (AXP) hired Harvard psychology lecturer Shawn Achor to train their remaining employees in positive thinking. Says Achor: "All the employees had just stopped working."
In a typical downturn, the percentage decline in payrolls is about the same as the percentage decline in gross domestic product. But in the recessions that began in 2001 and 2007, the decline for payrolls was much steeper—1.8 percentage points more during the latest downturn. Worse yet, only about 10% of the layoffs are considered temporary, vs. 20% in the recession of the early 1980s.
PERMA-TEMPS
All that cutting has been good for corporate profits. Earnings rebounded smartly as companies kept payrolls down after the 2001 recession; by 2006 profits had hit a 40-year high as a share of national income, at 10.2%, according to Bureau of Economic Analysis data. The credit bust sent that figure plunging to 5.6% during the final quarter of 2008. But over the past year corporate profits' share has rebounded to 7.4% of national income, equaling the 40-year average.
The trend toward a perma-temp world has been developing for years. Bosses are no longer rewarded based on how many people they supervise, so they have less incentive to hang on to staff. Instead, the increasing use of bonuses tied to short-term profit performance gives managers an incentive to slash labor costs. The Iowa Policy Project, a nonpartisan think tank, estimates that 26% of the U.S. workforce had jobs in 2005 that were in one way or another "nonstandard." That includes independent contractors, temps, part-timers, and freelancers. Of those, 73% had no access to a retirement plan from their employer and 61% had no health insurance from their employer, the Iowa group said.
Temp employment in the U.S. fluctuates wildly, by design. The whole purpose of bringing on workers who are employed by temporary staffing firms such as Manpower (MAN), Adecco (ADO), and Kelly Services is that they're easy to shuck off when unneeded. While the number of temps fell sharply during the recent recession, the ranks of involuntary part-timers soared. The tally of Americans working part-time for economic reasons—that is, because full-time work is unavailable—has doubled since the recession began, to 9.2 million.
Companies that seized on the recession as an opportunity to make drastic organizational changes for greater efficiency and flexibility aren't likely to reverse those changes once the economy begins growing again, says David H. Autor, a labor economist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In other words, most of the jobs shipped to China will stay in China. And companies that turned labor into a just-in-time, flexible factor of production won't return to an old-fashioned job-for-life arrangement. "For the last 10 years, I and others have been saying that these trends aren't just for a fringe workforce but increasingly are for the mainstream," says Sara Horowitz, founder and executive director of the Freelancers Union, a 130,000-member advocacy group for contract workers. "This recession has shown us that the future is here."
Boeing (BA) typifies the companies that are taking advantage of flexibility. In 2009, it cut 1,500 contingent workers from its commercial division. Says spokesman Jim Proulx: "The first imperative was to reduce all of the contract and contingent labor that we possibly could to shield our regular employees from those layoffs." Boeing says less than 3% of its workforce is contingent. It has also reduced its dependence on costly permanent staff in the U.S. by making new hires abroad. Last March it announced a research and development center in Bangalore that will "coordinate the work of more than 1,500 technologists, including 100 advanced technology researchers, from across India." Bill Dugovich, a spokesman for Boeing's white-collar union in the U.S., the SPEEA, complains that the Indian workers "are basically contract labor."
For years Microsoft (MSFT) has been an avid user of temporary-staffing firms such as Volt Information Sciences (VOL) for a variety of short-term projects, including writing chunks of software, says Microsoft spokesman Lou Gellos. "Our contingent workforce fluctuates wildly depending on the different projects that are going on," Gellos says. "Somebody does just part of a project. They're experts in it. Boom, boom, they're finished." Temps are especially appealing to companies in cyclical industries. "We have been able to get really good talent. Off the charts," says Jeff Barrett, CEO of Eggrock, a manufacturer of pre-built bathrooms based in Littleton, Mass. It has brought on dozens of plumbers, electricians, and administrative workers through Manpower to handle a spike in orders.
With the economy expanding again, and employers loath to add permanent workers, temp employment is one of the few sectors of the labor market that is growing rapidly. Stock prices for the big temp firms have doubled since last March, while analysts surveyed by Bloomberg expect profits to double in 2010 at Robert Half International (RHI) and to jump about 50% at Manpower. LiveOps is among the biggest beneficiaries of the just-in-time labor trend; its revenues grew by a double-digit percentage in 2009 and the company is planning an initial public offering. "We want to do for the world of work what eBay did for commerce," says LiveOps CEO Maynard Webb, a former chief operating officer of eBay (EBAY). "You have access to the talent you need. And when the need is gone, the talent goes away."
"LEADERSHIP ON DEMAND"
The world of temporary work used to be the domain of sneaker-footed admins. No longer. Last year, Kelly Services placed more than 100 people—including lawyers and scientists—in interim stints that paid more than $250,000 a year. At the forefront of the "leadership on demand" movement in the U.S. is the Business Talent Group, whose roster of 1,000 executives has done jobs at companies like mobile-phone content provider Fox Mobile (NWS), health-care company Healthways (HWAY), and private equity firm Carlyle Group. BTG says its client demand rose 50% in 2009.
Sydney Reiner, of Southern California, has had five assignments in five years as an interim chief marketing officer at companies like Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf and Godiva Chocolatier. "I got a call from Godiva on a Wednesday asking if I could be on a plane to Japan on Saturday," says Reiner. "I was." For the past two months, she's been the interim chief marketing officer at beverage maker POM Wonderful. Reiner prefers the challenge of working in short, adrenaline-packed chunks. But like Smith, the University of Chicago MBA has no access to employer-sponsored health insurance and other benefits. Says Reiner: "To some extent I end up working as hard as a permanent employee, without a lot of the benefits."
Reiner relishes the flexibility of the free-agent lifestyle. While there are others like her, many upscale, white-collar workers aren't contingent laborers by choice. Matthew Bradford, who is 38 and married with three young children, could scarcely believe it when he was laid off in early 2009 by a national law firm in Cleveland. He eventually set up as a one-man "legal professional association" in Akron, handling overflow from other lawyers while he slowly builds up his own practice. Meanwhile he's responsible for his own health insurance and a share of office overhead, things he never considered when he was on track to making partner back in Cleveland. "I never would have thought this would have happened," says Bradford. "I thought, 'Hey, I've got a law degree and an MBA. I'm not going to be out of work.' It's just not the case anymore."
During the boom-time 1990s, employers sold the move away from secure full-time jobs as pure upside for workers—a step toward greater flexibility and freedom. To compete with dot-coms, corporations like IBM (IBM) started replacing some fixed pay with variable compensation: stock options, bonuses, and other cash incentives that have to be renegotiated each year. It was attractive for awhile, but the Great Recession is showing workers the downside of that deal. Employers' unspoken message to employees, says Cornell University labor economist Kevin F. Hallock, is this: "You can absorb more risk, or you're going to lose your job. Which would you prefer?"
At the bottom of the ladder, workers are so powerless that simply getting the minimum wage they're entitled to can be a struggle. A study released in September and financed by the Ford, Joyce, Haynes, and Russell Sage Foundations found that low-wage workers are routinely denied proper overtime pay and are often paid less than the minimum wage. It followed a Government Accountability Office report from March 2009 that found that poor oversight by the Labor Dept.'s Wage & Hour Div. leaves low-wage workers "vulnerable to wage theft." Some companies have been fined for misclassifying employees as freelancers and then denying them benefits. Meanwhile, the George W. Bush Administration made it easier for people earning as little as $23,600 a year not to be covered by overtime-pay rules.
Workers hired for temporary or contract work face a higher risk of developing mental health problems like depression, according to research presented in 2009 by Amélie Quesnel-Vallée of McGill University. A lack of job security and health-care benefits, as well as social ties to the rest of the workforce, increase stress levels for temps and contractors. A survey conducted in September by the National Alliance on Mental Illness found that people who experienced a forced change in their employment during the last year were twice as likely to report symptoms consistent with severe mental illness as individuals who hadn't experienced one.
The situation is especially difficult for young people, many of whom haven't been able to get a first foot on the career ladder. The percentage of people 16 to 24 who have jobs has plummeted by 13 percentage points since the beginning of 2000, while the share of workers 55 and over who have jobs has edged up over the period, despite the recession. Some young people are so desperate to get a start, they're working for free as semi-permanent interns. "Companies that used to use only one or two interns are now asking me for five or six at a time," says Lauren Berger, who runs a company that matches interns with entertainment, marketing, and media companies. Berger also reports a rise in the number of "adult interns," who work for free while trying to break into a new career.
Those internships might look like plum spots in years to come, for the gloomy trends in the labor market show no sign of abating. Consider some statistics. In the 2001 recession cycle, the economy lost 2% of its jobs and took four years to get them back. This time it has lost more than 5% of its jobs. Even after the recession is history, employers are likely to continue to offshore and automate jobs out of existence. If they don't, they'll lose out to competitors that do. In a November update of previous research, Princeton University economist Alan S. Blinder estimated that 22% to 29% of all U.S. jobs will be offshorable within two decades. Of course, even working in a job that's not offshorable—say, landscaping—is no guarantee of job security or decent pay. That's because people in those jobs must compete with the millions of former factory workers and such whose jobs have already been offshored, notes Josh Bivens, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington.
IBM may strike many people as the quintessential American company, but 71% of its workforce was outside the U.S. at the end of 2008, a figure even higher than the non-U.S. share of its revenue (65%). In 2009 the company reduced its U.S. employment by about 10,000, or 8%. It also announced a program offering certain employees the opportunity to move their jobs to emerging markets; in turn, the company will foot some of the relocation costs.
PAY CUTS
When employment in the U.S. eventually recovers, it's likely to be because American workers swallow hard and accept lower pay. That has been the pattern for decades now: Shockingly, pay for production and nonsupervisory workers—80% of the private workforce—is 9% lower than it was in 1973, adjusted for inflation. Sure, back in the 1950s pillars of the economy such as General Motors paid generously, because they could. Contracts between GM and the United Auto Workers set a pattern for pay throughout the economy, says Harley Shaiken, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley who specializes in labor issues. But while unions covered 36% of private-sector workers in 1953, the figure plunged to less than 8% by 2008. "Today, working conditions are set either by trends in the global economy or by nonunion firms in the U.S.," says Shaiken. He points out that while GM was the largest U.S. employer in the 1950s, "today that role is played by Wal-Mart (WMT), with very different consequences."
The best solution to relieve the pressure on workers would be rapid economic growth sustained over a long period, possibly enabled by some technological breakthrough. The Internet boom pushed unemployment to less than 4% in 2000. But few economists expect such a renaissance anytime soon. That's why labor unions and politically liberal economists argue for New Dealesque public jobs programs and against free-trade pacts like the North American Free Trade Agreement. In 2007, Ralph E. Gomory, former head of IBM's research department and later a senior vice-president at the company, declared before a U.S. House panel: "In this new era of globalization the interests of companies and countries have diverged. In contrast with the past, what is good for America's global corporations is no longer necessarily good for the American people."
Conservative economists, in contrast, say the real problem is too much government intervention in the economy. Employers who might be adding jobs are frozen in place by uncertainty over the impact of pending legislation on health care, global warming, and other big-ticket items, says economist Steven J. Davis of the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business. "I can't think of another time during my professional lifetime when there was so much riding on policy decisions that could get made in the next year or two."
For a glimpse of where things might be headed in the U.S., look at Europe, which makes a lot more use of temporary and part-time workers than U.S. employers do. That's in large part because of Europe's famously rigid labor laws; rather than hiring permanent workers, employers turn to temps and contractors who can be let go more easily during a downturn. In Spain, 85% of recent job losses in this recession were by temps or contractors. One big difference: Most European countries cover temps and part-timers with government health insurance and require that they receive wages and benefits comparable to those for permanent employees doing similar work.
Look far enough into the future and it's possible to see better times ahead for labor. A decade from now the retirement of the baby boom generation could cause labor shortages and hand some bargaining power back to younger workers, says Robert Mellman, a senior economist at JPMorgan Chase Bank (JPM). If that happens, woe unto employers. A survey in 2009 by the benefits consultant now known as Towers Watson found that top-performing employees will be ready to jump ship as soon as a better offer comes along. Says Wharton's Cappelli: "The idea of loyalty—'I will stick with you and you will reward me'—that is effectively gone."
But those are issues for another day. Right now the face of American labor is more like that of Jamila Godfrey, 35, of Seattle. A licensed naturopathic physician, she ran an alternative medicine practice but decided to scoop up another degree, this time in nursing, for greater job security. Though she graduated in June, and health care is the strongest sector in the economy, she hasn't been able to find a job because hospitals can't spare the money for three months of on-the-job training. To support herself and her 12-year-old daughter, the single mother has been working as a temp for the past several months, but that project ends in several weeks. "I'll be jobless again," says Godfrey. "I thought the [RN] qualification would make it easy to find a job, but it's not working out that way."
By Dan Balz and Paul Kane Washington Post Staff Writer Thursday, January 21, 2010; A08
A day after their embarrassing loss in Massachusetts, splintered Democrats pledged to refocus their attention on jobs and the economy, and to draw sharper contrasts with Republicans, as they scramble to find a strategy to quell the populist anger that threatens the party's standing in the November elections.
Elected officials and Democratic strategists found little common ground, however, in the specifics of their response to their party's shellacking in Massachusetts, whether on how to proceed with a health-care bill that has become a political liability or on the elements of a jobs program that can dent the unemployment rate.
But they did agree that voters are prepared to punish them, not only because the economy has not improved faster, but also because they have not delivered on one of the central promises of President Obama's campaign: changing the way Washington does business.
Former Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean said the proper course for Democrats now "is exactly the position the president took when he ran," which Dean said was to pledge that special interests would not run the government under his administration. "What voters think, unfortunately, is that they do run Washington," he said.
Pennsylvania Gov. Edward G. Rendell said it was "just wrong" to interpret Republican state Sen. Scott Brown's victory over Democratic state Attorney General Martha Coakley in Massachusetts as a crushing defeat for the president, citing the vagaries of special elections and the difference in the quality of the two campaigns.
But he said Democrats must urgently begin to deliver on their promises in order to head off sizable losses later this year. "Let's give people a reason to turn out and vote for us," Rendell said. "Let's pass a jobs bill. Let's pass a health-care bill. Be a party. Stand up and get things done."
A focus on independents
Sen. Robert Menendez (N.J.), who as chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee helped oversee Coakley's losing bid, said the key political ambition in the next 9 1/2 months is to "make sure we find a way to engage independent voters."
Coakley ran poorly among independents, according to pre-election polls, continuing a trend that surfaced in Virginia's and New Jersey's gubernatorial elections last November, when such voters deserted Democrats and backed Republicans.
But Menendez's House counterpart said focusing primarily on independents is a false choice that could leave the party's left flank demoralized and on the sidelines in November.
Rep. Chris Van Hollen (Md.), chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said the party must find a way to pass a health-care bill, which would help soothe anger among liberals who feel slighted by the agenda so far, and should push an economic program that appeals to independents concerned about unemployment.
On Capitol Hill, Democrats are focused on the health-care conundrum -- whether they can quickly pass legislation and move on to other issues, principally the economy. "What we don't want to see is that this [health care] is to the exclusion of other things," said Sen. Benjamin L. Cardin (Md.), a leading liberal. "You have to be able to see the finish line. We're now at the last hurdles. You have to have a plan that can win."
Sen. Robert P. Casey Jr. (D-Pa.) said that he favors trying to finish health care but that it must be wrapped up quickly to allow a turn to a new agenda. "It's got to be jobs, almost exclusive of everything else," he said.
If the present climate holds through the fall, Pennsylvania Democrats face the prospect of losing the governor's mansion, a Senate seat and at least six House seats in November.
'It's our problem'
Delaware Gov. Jack Markell, chairman of the Democratic Governors Association, said there is considerable impatience among voters and Democrats must be responsive. "My sense of it is that people in power, whether federal or state, are seen as the people who are responsible," he said. "We have an affirmative responsibility to do so something about these issues."
Markell predicted that once the unemployment rate starts to go down, some of the anger in the electorate will ease. "Until then, it's our problem," he said.
The lack of consensus in the Senate about job creation complicates Democrats' desire to show the public that they are focused on the economy. "The tough part for Democrats is that it is a governance issue, a really substantive problem," said Bill Carrick, a California-based Democratic strategist. "The Republicans don't have to deal with it. All they have to deal with is, 'We don't like what they're doing.' "
South Carolina Democratic Party Chairwoman Carol Fowler said part of the party's problem is that "people voted for change, and change didn't happen the next day. . . . There are lot of people in this country who are miserable, who want something done. Voting people out, whether they've been in office a week or years, seems like the way to get change."
Fowler said Democrats must move more aggressively to hold Republicans accountable for their opposition to the administration's agenda, rather than changing the agenda.
Carrick agreed that drawing sharp contrasts is the key to survival for Democratic candidates this fall. He pointed to the 1994 elections, when Republicans rode anger at Washington and dissatisfaction with the Clinton administration to a landslide takeover of the House and the Senate. "The few that survived at the top of the tickets were campaigns that recognized the situation they were in and moved aggressively to frame the election as a comparative choice," he said.
Looking ahead to this fall, Carrick added, "This is not going to be a campaign where we're going to see people talking in lofty terms about the future of the country."
By Frank Ahrens Washington Post Staff Writer Tuesday, December 29, 2009; A11
Consumers spent a little more than anticipated during the holiday season, according to a report out on Monday, and a significant e-tail threshold may have been crossed on Christmas Day at Amazon, the online bookseller.
For the first time ever, online sales of e-books on Christmas Day exceeded sales of physical books at Amazon, the company said on Monday.
Overall, retail spending from Nov. 1 to Dec. 24 rose 3.6 percent compared with the corresponding period last year, according to MasterCard's SpendingPulse survey, which tracks all retail spending, including cash transactions.
The increase was partly attributable to one extra shopping day in 2009. Even removing that day, retail spending still beat last year's performance, when recession-dampened sales slumped 2.3 percent compared with the 2007 period.
This year's results also bested expectations, which forecast a 1 percent slump in holiday spending across November and December, compared with last year's historically bad results.
"While up is good, it wasn't going to take much" to beat 2008 holiday spending, said Miller Tabak equity strategist Peter Boockvar. "Things are better but still sluggish, and consumers are still fervently looking for sales."
Boockvar pointed to reports Monday of people returning gifts in exchange for cash to buy necessities as "a sign that the labor market and people's pocketbooks are still very uncertain."
According to government data, consumer spending makes up about 70 percent of U.S. gross domestic product. The biggest jump in 2009 holiday retail spending happened online, where purchases rose 15.5 percent compared with last year, the survey said. They now account for about 10 percent of all retail sales.
Contributing to the online surge were electronic book purchases from Amazon, meant for use on the company's Kindle reading device.
Amazon, however, does not release sales figures on Kindle sales, nor on e-books sold on Christmas Day.
Using built-in wireless technology and an electronic display, the Kindle lets users download digitized books, blogs, magazines and newspapers in almost any location and read them on the device's six-inch screen immediately.
Amazon introduced the Kindle in 2007. The peak in e-book purchases on Christmas Day indicates that a number of Kindles were given as Christmas presents and were used to buy books that day. In a release, Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos called the Kindle, which sells for $259, the "most-gifted item ever in our history."
On a wider scale, the uptick in holiday spending came from electronics, jewelry and footwear, which combined to make up more than 16 percent of all sales, MasterCard said.
Sales at department stores dipped 2.3 percent, MasterCard said.
MasterCard's online sales report was backed up by data from comScore on Monday, showing that November online spending rose 10 percent measured against November last year. This year, consumers geared up for the holidays buying $12.3 billion worth of goods over the Internet.
On 2009's "Cyber Monday" -- the first business day after the Thanksgiving weekend, when a surge in online sales is typically expected -- spending rose 5 percent, with half of all sales coming from work computers, comScore said.
But on Black Friday -- the day after Thanksgiving, which is thought of as a big, brick-and-mortar retail spending day -- online spending actually rose 11 percent compared with November 2008, comScore said.
Online sales hit a one-day high of $913 million on Dec. 15, comScore reported, the first time they have topped the $900 million mark.
Monday's positive retail news pushed stocks modestly higher. The Dow Jones industrial average rose 0.26 percent to close at 10,547.08. The broader Standard & Poor's 500-stock index rose 0.12 percent to close at 1127.78 and the tech-heavy Nasdaq composite index climbed 0.24 percent, reaching 2291.08.
With three days left in the trading year -- and decade -- the Dow is up 20 percent, the S&P 500 is up 25 percent and the Nasdaq is up 45 percent year-to-date.
Contrary to countless reports, the debacle in Copenhagen was not everyone's fault. It did not happen because human beings are incapable of agreeing, or are inherently self-destructive. Nor was it all was China's fault, or the fault of the hapless UN.
There's plenty of blame to go around, but there was one country that possessed unique power to change the game. It didn't use it. If Barack Obama had come to Copenhagen with a transformative and inspiring commitment to getting the U.S.economy off fossil fuels, all the other major emitters would have stepped up. The EU, Japan, China and India had all indicated that they were willing to increase their levels of commitment, but only if the U.S. took the lead. Instead of leading, Obama arrived with embarrassingly low targets and the heavy emitters of the world took their cue from him.
(The "deal" that was ultimately rammed through was nothing more than a grubby pact between the world's biggest emitters: I'll pretend that you are doing something about climate change if you pretend that I am too. Deal? Deal.)
I understand all the arguments about not promising what he can't deliver, about the dysfunction of the U.S. Senate, about the art of the possible. But spare me the lecture about how little power poor Obama has. No President since FDR has been handed as many opportunities to transform the U.S. into something that doesn't threaten the stability of life on this planet. He has refused to use each and every one of them. Let's look at the big three.
Blown Opportunity Number 1: The Stimulus Package When Obama came to office he had a free hand and a blank check to design a spending package to stimulate the economy. He could have used that power to fashion what many were calling a "Green New Deal" -- to build the best public transit systems and smart grids in the world. Instead, he experimented disastrously with reaching across the aisle to Republicans, low-balling the size of the stimulus and blowing much of it on tax cuts. Sure, he spent some money on weatherization, but public transit was inexplicably short changed while highways that perpetuate car culture won big.
Blown Opportunity Number 2: The Auto Bailouts Speaking of the car culture, when Obama took office he also found himself in charge of two of the big three automakers, and all of the emissions for which they are responsible. A visionary leader committed to the fight against climate chaos would obviously have used that power to dramatically reengineer the failing industry so that its factories could build the infrastructure of the green economy the world desperately needs. Instead Obama saw his role as uninspiring down-sizer in chief, leaving the fundamentals of the industry unchanged.
Blown Opportunity Number 3: The Bank Bailouts Obama, it's worth remembering, also came to office with the big banks on their knees -- it took real effort not to nationalize them. Once again, if Obama had dared to use the power that was handed to him by history, he could have mandated the banks to provide the loans for factories to be retrofitted and new green infrastructure to be built. Instead he declared that the government shouldn't tell the failed banks how to run their businesses. Green businesses report that it's harder than ever to get a loan.
Imagine if these three huge economic engines -- the banks, the auto companies, the stimulus bill -- had been harnessed to a common green vision. If that had happened, demand for a complementary energy bill would have been part of a coherent transformative agenda.
Whether the bill had passed or not, by the time Copenhagen had rolled around, the U.S. would already have been well on its way to dramatically cutting emissions, poised to inspire, rather than disappoint, the rest of the world.
There are very few U.S. Presidents who have squandered as many once-in-a-generation opportunities as Barack Obama. More than anyone else, the Copenhagen failure belongs to him.
Research support for Naomi Klein's reporting from Copenhagen was provided by the Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute.
By Anne Hull Washington Post Staff Writer Thursday, December 17, 2009; A01
WARREN, OHIO -- All day long the front door buzzes at Uptown Gems & Jewels. The people come in with their trinkets wrapped in tissue or velvet boxes. They say their hours have been cut or they've been laid off. Some have their first names stitched in cursive on their uniforms, others wear safety-toe boots.
At campaign time, they are celebrated as the people who built America. Now they just want to know how much they can get for a wedding band.
"Let me show you something," says Dallas Root, standing behind the counter with a jeweler's loupe strung around his neck. He holds up a gallon-size Ziploc bag that's two-thirds full of gold -- engagement rings, class rings, promise rings, serpentine chains, St. Christopher medals, bracelets, anklets and earrings.
Uptown Gems & Jewels doesn't offer the refined science of Wall Street or Washington. But when Root puts the loupe to his eye, he peers into the lives of the working class and sees how badly the recession has knocked them to the ground.
The same week he holds up the sack of gold is the same week that Ford Motor Co. posts third-quarter profits of $1 billion, news that sparks optimism that a national recovery is underway. But a good week for some is still a terrible week for others.
In this corner of northeast Ohio, from Warren to Youngstown, where the old steel mills along the Mahoning River stand like rusted-out mastodons in the weeds, the recession was a final cruelty piled on top of three decades of disappearing jobs.
The recession here wasn't a black hole at the end of a sustained boom, or downgrading from Target to Wal-Mart or cutting out $3 drinks at Starbucks. It was a confrontation with survival.
As other areas of the country start to revive, the recession's full force is still on display here. Winter has descended. Unemployment benefits are running out. New jobs have not appeared. And the door keeps swinging open at Uptown Gems & Jewels.
Dallas Root tries to describe the moment when a person parts with his last glint of prosperity.
"They don't want to look desperate," he says. "They say, 'I've had this stuff lying around and I was thinking about getting rid of it.' There's a lot of pride in Warren."
But the pride is mixed with 15 percent unemployment and a sickening worry that the recovery might never touch this place.
'A final erasure'
The road from Warren and Youngstown is a graveyard of silent machines behind chain-link fences. Near the Pennsylvania border, this 25-mile stretch along the Mahoning River was the world's fifth-largest producer of steel until the late 1970s, when more than 50,000 jobs vanished in a decade. The General Motors plant in Lordstown, which employed 14,000 in the 1970s, is down to about 2,500 workers.
The ladies at Holy Trinity Ukrainian Catholic Church still sell pierogies every Friday, and Youngstown's classic rock station still bows its shaggy head before playing "Crystal Ball" by Styx, but the grit and grime of industrialization has mostly gone overseas.
Since January 2008, another 10,000 manufacturing jobs have been lost, according to recent Ohio employment figures.
In Warren, the once-mighty Delphi Packard Electric is a ghostly presence after the auto-parts maker cut 260 more employees. The $2 million in income tax revenue the city received from Delphi in 2003 has dropped to $70,000. Smaller casualties abound: Ohio Lamp laid off 80, Mahoning Glass announced the closure of its 100-worker plant and the list goes on.
"It's a final erasure," says John Russo, a labor studies professor at Youngstown State University, describing the lethality of job losses and plant closures.
Here is what the recovery looks like in the land of the working class:
Grown women in hairnets are working alongside teenagers at drive-through windows, and college graduates are loading bread trucks.
"A 48-year-old Youngstown man was charged, accused of stealing $14 worth of food from Rite Aid Pharmacy," reads an entry in the weekly police report published in the Vindicator. "A Youngstown woman, 21, was charged with filling a shopping cart with $154 worth of groceries and leaving an Aldi food store without paying."
In a place defined by work, there is little to be had.
One gray morning, a man named George Tomlin is grateful to be driving to his job.
Tomlin, 41, has worked in an aluminum foundry, a meatpacking house and a vinyl fabricator, each job paying a little less than the one before. Two years ago, he found temp work in a factory that made flowerpots. He received $7.50 an hour and jolts to his belt buckle from static electricity coming off the assembly line.
"There were other places that were dirtier, but you didn't get shocked every 15 minutes," Tomlin says with resignation. "This is what people around here without union jobs have to do to survive."
Tomlin found his own version of economic recovery last year when he landed a $10-an-hour job that seems like it might last.
Just before 8 a.m., he pulls into the company parking lot where hundreds of cars are already parked and more are arriving. Carrying his lunchbox and Thermos, he walks toward the bright lights of the 82,000-square-foot facility.
Behold the new factory: a mega-call-center that employs 1,280 workers who field incoming customer-service calls for a wireless phone company and a satellite television provider. The center is operated by the Omaha-based West Corp., lured to the area by tax credits and an abundance of low-skilled workers.
Tomlin is soft-spoken and tries to use the human touch. He's supposed to limit customer calls to five minutes but often goes longer.
"You got a 65-year-old woman whose husband is just out of the hospital with a stroke," he says. "The only thing he's got is a TV and hospice. She's having trouble paying her bills. I say, 'I'm gonna give you a $15 credit and we are going to get through this.' "
Another company violation. Tomlin loves this job and wants to keep it, so he reminds himself to stick to the rules.
At 4:30 p.m., he takes off his headset and walks out to the parking lot. When Tomlin was a kid, the air glittered with black from the blast furnaces at the steel mills. Now the skies are spooky clean, and all that moves in the wind is the call center's recruiting banner that says, "We Don't Hire Robots."
'There's nothing for them'
Two miles from the call center that doesn't hire robots, Sgt. Carmen Sagnimeni is sitting in a county office building wondering if anyone is hiring soldiers.
A poster in the Trumbull County Veterans Service Commission announces that November is "Hire a Vet Month," but prospects are bleak for those returning from Iraq or Afghanistan. In wars being disproportionately fought by the working class, the reward for coming home to this part of Ohio is "The Deer Hunter" with an Olive Garden.
Sagnimeni is just back from his second tour in Iraq with the Pennsylvania National Guard. He is 30, with a weary smile and a jiggling leg. He already has orders to go to Afghanistan in 2012. Until then, he has a mortgage and three kids to feed. His only lead so far is a $9-an-hour security guard job he found while surfing Monster.com in Iraq.
He goes in to see Herman Breuer, a veterans affairs officer and fellow Iraq vet whose spotless desk is appointed with a mini-tombstone paperweight chiseled with the words "headstone marker and burial benefits desk." Sagnimeni listens as Breuer patiently explains his options, urging him to consider using the Post-9/11 GI Bill to go to college until the economy gets better. As far as decent jobs, Breuer is unusually blunt. "My best advice is to look into moving," he tells the young sergeant.
Things were different for the last generation that came home from war to this valley. In 1969, a soldier back from Vietnam was greeted by a landscape roaring with manufacturing jobs that provided blue-collar ascendancy to the middle class.
The proof is right down the street at VFW Post 1090, where two dozen Vietnam veterans are eating the $4.95 lunch special of cabbage rolls. One by one, the men name the companies where they spent their lives: GM, Delphi, General Electric, Halsey Taylor, Rockwell International.
John Stefan recently retired after 32 years at GE, earning $35 an hour at the end.
"I see the young ones, there's nothing for them," says Stefan, who draws a monthly pension. "Why go to a vet center for a job you know doesn't exist? They are all probably just hiding in their basements."
One of the vets here recently brought in a young female Iraq vet who'd been living under a bridge in Warren. Cmdr. Jack Hilles fed her hot meals for two weeks, and another vet helped her find work at an injection molding plant.
"We even found her some clothes," says Hilles, anger in his voice. "She didn't have any goddamn civilian clothes."
They are everywhere in this Ohio -- under bridges, in basements, at the vast Eastwood Mall complex that sprawls between Warren and Youngstown with a dented vitality.
There is a gym attached to the mall, and one night a 25-year-old Marine named Rob Townsend comes out and tosses his gear in his car. He pops his trunk and, measuring powder and water, mixes a high-protein shake called Monster Milk. Eleven months back from Afghanistan, and Townsend can feel himself diminishing in size and strength. In the glow of the Save-A-Lot sign, he drinks the muscle juice.
Townsend was a cook with the Third Marine Division at a forward operating base in Helmand province, working in 150-degree heat surrounded by blast walls to protect him from mortars. After getting out last year, he moved back into his parents' house in Hubbard. He drank too much. At a party, the cops showed up with sirens, and he found himself in a low crouch, crawling through the neighborhood. He went to the VA clinic in Liberty to talk to someone.
"I wasn't the way I was," Townsend says.
Neither was Ohio. His two younger brothers had work -- one painting cars and the other at a grinding mill -- but Townsend's old construction job vanished. He decided to enroll at Youngstown State on the GI Bill, where he's taking 15 hours this semester next to kids in red "Go, Penguins!" hoodies. The classes are hard, but he is trying.
Outside the mall, Townsend shuts his trunk. With his desert camouflage Marine cap in the rear windshield, he rolls out, no longer in an armored vehicle but a dented Chevy Cavalier, moving past the retail outcroppings of the Hobby Lobby and Burlington Coat Factory.
'We've been thrown away'
The last of the leaves have fallen on Trumbull Avenue, a street of square lawns and American cars where neighbors are dutifully raking. If steel is dead and manufacturing is going overseas and new-wave economists say brain hubs such as Portland and Raleigh are the future, what becomes of Trumbull Avenue?
Before there was a so-called creative class, there were people who made light bulbs, water fountains, aluminum siding and electrical harnesses for cars. This is what held Trumbull Avenue together.
Tom Szykulski finishes raking and comes inside. Dinner is in the crockpot and the furniture smells faintly of lemony wax. Debbie Szykulski must clean as maniacally as her husband rakes. But the order is deceptive. The Szykulskis have lost their jobs and are down to Tom's unemployment benefits check. He is 53 and she is 55. They have just joined the ranks of Americans without health insurance.
"I feel like we've been thrown away," Debbie says, sitting at the kitchen table. Tom is quiet. He adjusts his cap. The company where he worked for 24 years, Indalex Aluminum Solutions, shut down last year, and he lost his $40,000-a-year union job. He was lucky to pick up work as a laborer at Wheatland Tube Co. for $12 an hour, but when business slowed, he was laid off from there, too.
"He's a hard worker," Debbie says, looking at her husband. "He worked 12-hour days. In 11 months, he never missed a day of work."
Tom corrects her. "Now, I did leave early that one day."
"That's all we know," she says. "He's not a school person. He's not a book person."
Debbie became unemployed when the roofing company she worked for went out of business. She has gone all over Warren filling out job applications. "I've tried the drugstore, the mall, the pet store," she says. "I applied for a nursing home job, in the kitchen. They paid $7.95 an hour."
Nothing.
"I have a shining work record," she says. "I'm not computer-savvy. I'm smart. I can learn quick."
Tom stands up. He is a big man. He wears a Cleveland Cavs T-shirt. His son will soon ship out to Afghanistan. He pushes the kitchen chair in. He doesn't know what to do with himself. He drives downtown to pay the water bill. Debbie watches him go. The small house is a still life of what a union job and hard work once afforded. No second mortgage here or big vacations on the credit card. Their weekly splurge was driving 10 miles outside Warren on Friday nights to their favorite diner.
"I get angry," Debbie says. "Not out of jealousy, but that I can't find a job. I don't want a big fancy house. I want to be able to go out to dinner on a Friday night. I'd like to be able to send my grandson a little something in the mail. I would be happy with a minimum-wage-paying job, 40 hours a week, come home, spend time with my husband. And know that the next day, I can go into my job."
She pauses. "I just want the simple pleasures."
Both her grandfathers worked at Republic Steel, and her father retired from Packard Electric. Her house has been in the family since 1936, when Trumbull Avenue was more pasture than street. Her parents still live a block away. If outsiders wonder why she has stayed in a Rust Belt city on the endangered list, the answers are all around her.
But she doesn't know how they will survive if Tom doesn't find work soon.
She has already done the unthinkable.
One afternoon, Debbie -- nice, responsible Debbie, Book-of-the-Month Club member and fan of "Masterpiece Classics" -- gathered up her gold jewelry and put it in the red vinyl lunch bag she used to carry to work when she had a job. She drove to Uptown Gems & Jewels and unloaded everything she had for $876. The money is long gone.
Staff researcher Julie Tate in Washington contributed to this report.
Jaclyn Nardone December 14, 2009In recent years, Dubai became known as a metropolis of wealth, the economic capital of the Middle East. This Arab Emirate, once rich in tourism and real estate, has recently taken an economic nose-dive with no promising solutions for revival. This essay will take a step back in time, to when Dubai’s markets were rich and growing, and explore how and why it became the place it is, or was. The answer is short and sweet: cheap labor and migrant construction workers. But an explanation behind the inhumane gap between the lavish rich and the destitute poor is a sad and complicated tale based on human rights violations. Living off dollars a day, exhausted and overworked, the men in hard-hats live lives completely contrary to those of the country’s capitalists. This analysis of the mass violations committed amid the UAE Federal Labor Law, leads to open-ended questions. What will the future hold for these workers, many of whom have already left the country? With Dubai’s debts channeling rumors of bankruptcy, will they be better off without the unjust jobs, or the hardest hit by this recession? It seems as though karma has crept up on the selfishness of Dubai, and with migrant workers fleeing the country, it may be too late for forgiveness, but it is worth a try. With fingers crossed and positive thoughts brewing, let’s hope Dubai can come out of this mess, and reroute the image it has given itself thus far, as a mass human rights violator within the realm of cheap labor.
The Trucial States along the Arab Peninsula transformed into the oil rich country of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) on December 4th 1971. Little did the world, this country that was once summit by desert, would blossom into the Golden Capital of the world, the New York of the Middle East. In recent years, “entire cities cropped up where there was nothing 10 years ago.”[1] Dubai, one of the seven Arab Emirates, has been advertised to the world as a commercial haven of high-rise buildings, gorgeous cornices, and luxury cars. As the millennium grew older, Dubai grew richer. It has been known as a colossal metamorphosis growing within the economic sector, due to uncontrollable spikes in its trade and service industries. However, this phony economy would not last for long, and in this materialistic world of celebrity and eminence, Dubai seems to have used up its 15 minutes of fame.
The Emirate’s markets have recently become a plummeted disaster; Dubai is falling deeper and deeper into a cyclone of debt with no obvious or promising solutions for revival. This economic nosedive began in the wake of 2009, and by the year’s end, Dubai World sees itself owing some $59 billion US Dollars.[2] Wealthy brother Abu Dhabi has been criticized for not offering a helping hand, Emirates airlines has become too expensive for Dubai to single-handedly own and operate, workers have been laid off by the handfuls, newly built roads are empty of traffic, and the doors of the debtor prison are wide open. Dubai, once a place where investors played real-estate poker, now faces drastically declining shareholder confidence. This “downward spiral that has left parts of Dubai — once hailed as the economic superpower of the Middle East — looking like a ghost town.”[3]
Click for photo byEdson Walker - Dubai Indian Workers
Before understanding why Dubai’s economy is failing, which was “built on and bought with borrowed money,”[4] it is helpful to understand how it was callously built in the first place. It seems as though karma has crept up on the selfishness of Dubai, and it may be too late for forgiveness, but it is worth a try. This essay takes a step back in time, to 2008 and prior years, to when Dubai’s markets were rich and growing, and examine how mass violations of the UAE Federal Labor Law forced the migrant construction workers to live unjust lives, and suggests recommendations for future forgiveness.
Dubai’s population growth is a result of immigration’s push-pull effect, which pulls in expatriates from low waged countries, pushing them to seek employment in the growing Emirate.[5] This trend began in 1968, when migrant workers overwhelmed Dubai’s population by 54%.[6] By 2007, half a million migrant laborers were responsible for crafting the largest construction site on earth, whose projects toppled over 300 billion dollars.[7] As of 2006, these foreigners constituted 95%[8] of UAE’s workforce, outnumbering the country’s national workers by 1,000%.[9] The Dubai immigration boom has been compared to that of the United States of America, some 100 years ago; a Middle Eastern territory with a modern American Dream. Just as the “slave trade fed the wealth of the early Americas, expatriates are the foundation of growth in the UAE.”[10] Unskilled guest workers migrate to Dubai’s constructions sites from India, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, the Philippines and elsewhere. It was estimated that by 2007, some 25,000[11] migrants made their way through UAE immigration each month, leered to Dubai on false promises, unsure of the life that awaited them.
Modern day slavery is often prevalent where cultures and countries undergo rapid transformation and modernization, such as in Dubai. According to political philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “we have a moral obligation to condemn those who act to implement systems of slavery, caste, or racial domination.”[12] This scheme is evidently occurring in Dubai; migrant construction workers are treated like slave laborers within the lowest of class status brackets, in comparison to the local UAE citizens. “Man who are the property of another, politically and socially at a lower level than the mass of the people, and performing compulsory labor.”[13] These contemporary forms of worker subordination reveal that “there is little doubt, that in 2008, Dubai remains the region’s primary center for modern-day slavery.”[14]
Modernity constitutes modern markets and states that advance issues of equality and toleration. This hierarchical world of rulers and the ruled is progressively understood as a business, with office holders and their workers.[15] Dubai is a new state and market, and a hierarchical city of chiefs and subordinates. “A common assumption about industrialization is that "class consciousness" is the most fundamental category by means of which we are to understand workers’ experiences.”[16] Migrants are the subjugated lower class, who are subsidiary to the rule of their upper class, egalitarian supervisors and office holders. Worker’s labor is the price paid for the city’s industry, at low cost, which in turn retails basic human labor rights.
Dubai’s migrant construction workers are denied basic human labor rights, as defined by labor laws and international conventions and declarations. The business impact on human rights, with regards to labor rights, include freedom of association, the right to organize and participate in collective bargaining, right to non-discrimination, abolition of slavery and forced labor, right to equal pay for equal work, right to equality at work, right to just and favorable enumeration, right to a safe work environment, right to rest and leisure, and the right to family life. Migrant workers are denied each one of these labor rights, through the failed UAE Labor Law. “The root cause of the business and human rights predicament today lies in the governance gaps created by globalization [hence migrant workers] - between the scope and impact of economic forces and actors, and the capacity of societies to manage their adverse consequences.”[17]
The Federal Law (No.8, 1980), titled Regulation of Labor Relations, is responsible for reigning control and supervision over relationships between the state, the employer and migrant workers.[18] The UAE’s Federal Labor Law dictates all labor relations through the country, via the Ministry of Labor (directed by Dr. Dr. Ali bin Abdullah Al Kaabi) and his Council of Ministers. This Law, in partnership with labor examiners, is said to support both national and migrant workers; this is true for the former, however it fails to protect the human and labor rights of latter. “Until January 25th 2005, there were only 80 labor inspectors employed to look after the interests of approximately 2,738,000 expatriate workers. Now there are 130 inspectors; 1 UAE national inspector for every 21,062 expatriate employees.”[19]
Employers virtually own their workers once they arrive on Dubai soil. “The sponsorship system continues to be the mechanism through which workers enter labor-scarce Gulf countries.”[20] Prior to arrival in the UAE, foreign workers must be sponsored by a licensed local citizen, who is registered with the Ministry of Labor. This ensures that the workers are under full control and supervision of their sponsors during their stay in Dubai. The sponsor will decide where the workers shall travel to for work purposes, based on the economic needs of the country, at any given time. “This system, as applied to lower level positions, has been analogized to slavery because the employee is tied to one employer.”[21]
Confiscation of migrant workers passports is absolutely illegal, as stated under the UAE Labor Law and the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families. Article 21 of the Convention states that it is unlawful for people, including employers, to withhold one’s identification unless they are of public authority authorized to do so. The UAE Labor Law states that employers are not to confiscate or destroy personal documents, muddle with documents that authorize workers to stay or leave the country, or work permits.[22] Employers seize workers documents, regardless of what the law says, since they are rarely ever punished for doing so. In 2001, the Dubai Court of Cassation legally revealed the “open secret that employers in the UAE often confiscate the passports of their employees, yet the government chooses to ignore this illegal practice.”[23] In addition, bosses will enforce longer and stricter contracts on the workers, to further prevent them from leaving the country. The sponsorship initiative violates the basic human labor right of the abolition of slavery and forced labor.
Article 2 of the UAE Labor Law indicates that migrant worker’s records, contracts, files, and data are to be documented in the country’s official Arabic language. In addition, working instructions shall also be published in Arabic. This choice of language will always prevail, even if the worker speaks in a different native tongue.[24] This overtly violates the basic human labor rights to just and favorable enumeration and non-discrimination. It has been proposed that the Labor Law should ensure contracts and instructions be printed in the comprehended language of the workers, to avoid misconceptions, the spread of misinformation, and employer deception.[25] However, in Dubai’s favor, such language confusions are a cleaver way to trick migrant illiterate workers into unforeseen contracts, which once are signed, the government cannot help them escape from.
Article 101 of the UAE Labor Law requires employees to provide migrant workers in remote areas outside of Dubai’s centrality, with transportation, comfortable living accommodations, drinking water, adequate food supplies, health facilities, and recreational opportunities. The workers are not to be charged for any of these amenities.[26] The majority of these requirements are outstandingly overlooked and discounted by employers and Labor Law enforcement. Further understanding seeks detailed explanation.
Construction workers depend on their sponsors for everything, during their stay in Dubai. Since workers contribute to local traffic, which is already held up for hours each day, they are often dropped off 5-10 KM away from their work site.[27] Workers line up by the dozens just to secure a seat on the buses, which are crammed and unsafe. When they finally make it home from work, and load off the buses, communal life is somewhat restricted. Workers must seek approval from their bosses to obtain liquor licenses and to have or rent a telephone or satellite television.[28] Workers have no independent rights to a sufficient social life, should their employers not grant them access, hence violation of the human labor right to rest and leisure.
Hundreds of migrant workers live in ghettos, dwelling on the outskirts of capitalistic Dubai. The migrant workers in blue construction uniform return home from work to a room that is shared among many men. Many men are not lucky enough to have bunk-beds, and therefore sleep atop each other on the floor. Even worse, it is said that most workers sleep in small cells that are beyond comparable to the beautiful stalls that Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum’s horses live in.[29] The rooms often have one hole for washroom purposes and one water tap.[30] In a better case scenario, the workers share communal bathrooms, showers, and kitchens. The labor camps drown in desert sand and often lack garbage systems. Sonapur has been known as the worst labor camp, lacking basic essentials, such as a sewage system.[31] Inevitably, these labor camps make prisons seem like hotels. Eating conditions and food supply are not much better than other attributes to life; in worst case scenarios, the workers are sometimes only fed “two handfuls of old rice per day.”[32]
The UN’s International Convention on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), ensures just and favorable working conditions for everyone, which includes particular safe and healthy working conditions.[33] Article 91 of the UAE Labor Law, which refers to worker’s safety, protection, health and social care states that all employers are to “provide appropriate safety measures to protect workers against the hazards of occupational injuries and diseases that may occur during the work, and also against hazards that may result from the use of machines and other work tools.”[34] This supports the basic human labor right of a safe work environment. Article 142 of the UAE Labor Law sustains that should a worker suffer injuries on the jobsite, the employer is to immediately report the injury to police or to the labor department. A report should validate all personal and employment information, such as the construction worker’s “name, age, occupation, address, and nationality, and a brief account of the accident, its circumstances and the medical aid or treatment provided.”[35] Police are entitled to follow through with further investigations, which may require questioning witnesses. However, this is hardily ever necessary, because injuries are seldom reported by employers, as it adds too much confusion to their already inhumane practices.
Unsafe working conditions are beyond hazardous, and often deadly, due to the lack of safety equipment provided by their employers. Not only do employers never report worker injuries, even worse, they rarely report migrant deaths that result from worksite blunders. It is up to the employers to immediately notify the Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs, should a death arise, but very few take action. Dr. Khalid Khazraji, Labor Undersecretary at the Ministry of Labor, said that this gives reason to why “the government has no comprehensive data about numbers, causes of death or injury, or about the identity of those dead or injured.” [36] In 2005, only 1/6 of the near 600 companies in Dubai reported worker injury or death; “800 workers died, only 34 were announced by the government [because] only 6 companies filed reports of death and injury.”[37]
“In an interview with the Indian consul in Dubai for the documentary Dans les Soutes de l’Eldorado, journalists Philippe Levasseur, Philippe Jasselin and Alexandre Berne claim to have been shown confidential reports showing that two Asians per day die on the construction sites of Dubai, and that there is a suicide every four days.”[38]Aside from accidental deaths, horrid working conditions lead to suicide among many labors. In 2004, the Indian consulate claimed that some 67 Indian workers commit suicide in Dubai, and some 100 more commit suicide within the following year. A specific case study details that “an Indian worker killed himself after his employer refused to give him 50 Dirhams to visit a doctor.”[39]/[40] Modern political theorists, such as Thomas Hobbs, philosophizes about his ideal state, which has strict control over its people, making them live a brutish, nasty, poor, and short life.[41] This ancient theory is recognized in the modern lifestyles of migrant workers in Dubai, hence high rates of suicide.
Employers need workers, but do not want to take responsibility of the men when they become injured on the job site, hence the rapid adoption of illegal workers to their workforce team. Seemingly very illicit, local government officials help companies and illegal workers in their efforts. These migrant laborers are of the most vulnerable, and face the most discrepancies and uncertainties, as they literally have no legal labor rights as illicit workers. A specific case study, from the Human Rights Watch organization, reveals these illegal working situations.
Chekalli, originally from Andhra Pradesh, India worked as an illegal migrant construction worker, employed in Dubai. He suffered major back injuries at the job site, especially on January 22nd 2006. Checkalli and his fellow injured work partner were dumped off at the government-run Kuwaiti Hospital in Emirate of Sharjah, to seek medical attention. Chekalli would soon come to realize that his injury caused him to be paralyzed, so not only could he no longer work, but he could no longer walk. Because injured Chekalli served no purpose for being in Dubai, due to his injury, “he would be returning to India without receiving any compensation for his work-related injuries.”[42] Without any reparations, reimbursements, or health insurance, Checkalli would have to take care of himself at home without any assistance from Dubai.
Legal migrant construction workers are paid exceptionally low wages, hence referring them to slave workers. This violates the basic human labor right of equal pay for equal work. Article 63 of UAE Labor Law states that a minimum wage shall be put in place, in accordance to the cost-of-living index payable to workers. It is up to the Minister of Labor to determine a minimum wage standard, that meets equivalencies to the worker’s cost of living, and that will provide for “basic needs and guarantee his livelihood.”[43] Migrant workers are paid close to nothing because they literally have close to nothing, as their living conditions are below minimum custom (hence a minimum wage based on the cost-of-living index payable to workers). Unlike Dubai’s wealthy, migrant’s lifestyles are not ones of extravagance. “Going to the cinema on their day off is out of the question. It costs more than a day’s wages.”[44]
Foreign construction workers are often paid about 600 Dirhams a month, equivalent to $160-170 US Dollars, while the average per capita income is over $2,000 US Dollars per month. These amounts equate to workers being paid about $1 US Dollar per hour. Workers are often in debt before traveling to Dubai, due to the loans they take from their home recruitment agencies, which secure their jobs abroad. In addition, debts increase when they arrive to Dubai, due to high visa and travel costs. Jus Codens norms prove that bonded labor in Dubai is a modern form of slavery, as “migrant workers spend several years working to pay back debts over which they have no control.”[45] This violates the 1926 and 1956 Conventions on Slavery.
Employers often illegally withhold employees low wages for months at a time. This prevents workers from sending money home to their families, who usually receive up to 80% of the migrant workers wages. Within the past few years, thousands of “workers filed complaints with the government about the non-payment of wages and labor camp conditions.”[46] This refusal of wages is of course illegal, under Article 56 of the UAE Labor Law, which indicates that workers on yearly or monthly contracts are to be paid at least once a month, while all other workers shall be paid biweekly.[47] Even though the Labor Law provides penalties for violations of its provisions, including withholding and the non-payment of wages, there has not been “a single instance where an employer was sanctioned, either by prison time or financial penalties, for failing to pay its workers,”[48] as of 2006.
In order to get paid, migrant workers must put in sufficient labor time on the construction site. Under Article 65, the UAE Labor Law states that the maximum normal working hours are 8 hours per day, totaling 48 hours per week. However, migrant construction workers often work 14 to 18 hour days, in the scorching 120(Fahrenheit) degree heat. Article 66 of the UAE Labor Law states that workers shall not labor for 5 hours without a break and Article 69 states that the “number of hours of actual overtime shall not exceed two a day.”[49] It is well know that these Laws are always violated, as laborers always work overtime, are given seldom breaks, and are never equally paid for their extra hours of labor. In addition, the UAE Labor Law’s working hours do not include “periods spent by a worker in traveling between his home and place of work.[50] Workers reside on Dubai’s outskirts, which is at least an hour drive from the construction sites and city’s lavish social scene. This means workers may spend up to 3 unpaid hours per day travelling to and from work.
Migrant workers “have great difficulty functioning outside of their own networks and have no access to government agencies or policies.”[51] They are unsatisfied with the horrid working conditions their employers force them to labor in, and therefore turn to public protests and strikes, in hopes to get their voices heard. Public demonstrations and protesting is illegal in Dubai; “when the workers strike as a result, they are jailed.”[52] Political parties, trade unions, and political organizations that may protect migrant works are also illegal. Freedom of assembly is a denied human labor right that confines migrant workers from political participation and involvement in the decision making processes. The UAE is a member country to the International Labor Organization (ILO), but their behavior does not coincide with the ILO’s Conventions on the Freedom of Association and Protection of the Right to Organize (No.87) and the Convention on the Right to Organize and Collective Bargaining (No.98).
Disregarding Dubai’s oppressive regimes, however, “between May and December of 2005, 8 major strikes took place.”[53] Throughout 2006, there were some 20 publically organized demonstrations in Dubai, in front of the Ministry of Labor building.[54] Amnesty International, a prominent worldwide human rights NGO, reported that in August and October of 2008, “hundreds of construction workers went on strike in Dubai to protest against low salaries and poor housing conditions, including a lack of safe water supplies.”[55] All these outbreaks prove that the Minister of Labor’s March 2006 promise for the legislation of a new Law to allow for trade unions and collective bargaining had failed. [56]
On March 11th 2007, workers of ETA Ascon, a company owned by the local Al Ghurair Emirati family of Dubai, sought revolts against their employer because of their low income wages. The companies 3,500 works only earn between 550-650 Dirhams each month. These workers demanded not only pay raises, but an “annual leave of one month and a return air ticket to their home country.”[57] 200 workers were to be deported as a result of the riots, which damaged a company vehicle, injured a company manager, and cost the company some 4 million Dirhams. Those who were allowed to keep their jobs and stay in Dubai received “a pay increase of 2 Dirhams (0.55 US Dollars) per day and a return air ticket home every two years.”[58] This situation is an example of how the migrant workers have little to no human labor rights, amid local Emirati people who seek economic gains at the expense of exploiting their workers.
Employers go unpunished for the unending lists of maltreatments that they enforce to control their migrant workers; “governance gaps between the employer and employee provide the permissive environment for wrongful acts by companies of all kinds without adequate sanctioning or reparation.”[59] More specifically, should a company be caught for breaching the law, in relation to the maltreatment of their workers, they shall only seek a small fine of between 6,000 and 12,000 Dirhams ($1,600-3,200 US Dollars).[60] Employers rarely ever take care of their workers, hence all the documented human rights violations. This leaves the construction workers with no one to turn to for assistance and aid. There is a desperate need to recognize and involve outside sources, should these human labor rights atrocities be punished and put to a stop.
Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), which fall under the category of Non-State Actors, are inspired to promote basic human labor rights and change societal norms by improving understandings, documenting violations of human rights, creating and supporting enforcement mechanisms, and implementing policies to solve problems. NGOs date back to various forms of Labor Movements, often focused on helping exploited migrant workers, among various other abused minority groups. In Dubai specifically, NGO’s are desperately needed to help free the migrant construction workers from conditions of slave labor, because governmental agencies and big business conglomerates refuse to do so. All 100 some domestic NGOs within UAE must be registered with the Ministry of Social Affairs, through which they receive financial assistance.[61]
One of the most prominent NGOs in Dubai that works toward irradiating the working conditions for migrant construction workers is the Human Rights Watch (HRW). HRW lies the “legal and moral groundwork for deep-rooted change and has fought to bring greater justice and security to people around the world.”[62] The HRW has been around for roughly 30 years, founded in 1978. As of 1989, one of its prominent divisions has been focused on Middle Eastern countries, hence their involvement in Dubai. The HRW monitors some 70 countries within many subcategories of violation issues, such as labor rights. In addition, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) is a leading NGO that promotes humanitarian law in foreign countries through the world, including in the UAE. The ICRC recognizes the mistaken choices the UAE federal government and local Dubai municipalities have taken in protecting the voices of their workers.
Promoting, protecting, monitoring, and implementing human rights is of main concern to the United Nation’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR); “the principal forum for negotiating international human rights norms.”[63] It is devised as a forum for counties, non-governmental groups, and human rights defenders. HRW recommends the UAE to develop a tighter relationship with the UN. The UAE is a signatory to the UN, as of December 4th 1971.[64] Therefore, the people residing and laboring within the country, under the UAE Labor Law, are entitled to the UN’s basic human labor rights. The UAE is urged to consider UN International Covenants, such as the Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR). The ICESCR seeks “the right of everyone to form trade unions and join the trade union of his choice, for the promotion and protection of his economic and social interests and the right to strike.”[65] The UAE should also consider the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), which guarantees the right to freedom of association; “everyone shall have the right to freedom of association with others, including the right to form and join trade unions for the protection of his interests.”[66]
HRW suggests that the UAE adopt the policies of the UN’s International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of their Families (ICPRMWMF). The UN’s Committee on Migrant Workers (CMW) seeks to enable and enforce rules and regulations under the ICPRMWMF. If properly considered and implemented, it will better enhance, protect, and secure the rights of its migrant construction workforce. The CMW is practiced through independent experts who monitor human rights protections, while states submit reports to the Committee, following up on implemented or ignored human right practices.[67] These Committees can only issue observations, comments, and recommendations based on their concerns for their member states. The way in which the CMW operates is very similar to the UN’s OHCHR and the International Labor Organization (ILO).
Supported by over 180 member states (including the UAE), the ILO works toward ridding work that involves various forms of slavery, such as the working conditions endured by the migrant construction workers in Dubai. The ILO is the first of its kind and was created by the Treaty of Versailles. After WWII, important conventions were created such as “freedom of association, the right to organize and bargain collectively, discrimination in employment, equality of remuneration, forced labor, migrant workers, workers’ representatives, and basic aims and standards of social policy.”[68] Dubai evidently chooses to ignore such procedures. States and national authorities, who chose to follow the ILO’s positive worker enforcements, are to submit reports to the ILO, for the Committee of Experts on the Application of Conventions and Recommendations (CEPCR) review. The ILO’s reporting and monitoring system can only make observations, which are supported and represented by national trade union representatives.[69]
In accordance with following the ILO’s labor laws, HRW raises prominent sections that Dubai needs to focus on; ILO’s Conventions concerning Forced or Compulsory Labour (No.29), Recommendation concerning Migration for Employment (No.86), Convention concerning Migration for Employment (No.97), Convention concerning Abolition of Forced Labour (No.105), the Convention concerning Migrations in Abusive Conditions and the Promotion of Equality of Opportunity and Treatment of Migrant Workers (No.143), the Recommendation concerning Migrant Workers (No.151), Conventions
[1] “Fastest Growing City in the World! Middle East 2.0 – Dubai.” YouTube Broadcast: Online. 18 Feb. 2007. <21 Nov. 2008.
[2] “UAE markets plunge again on Dubai debt drama.” 02 Dec. 2009. EUbusiness: Online. <10 Dec. 2009.
[3] Worth, Robert F. “Laid-off Foreigners leave as Dubai Spirals Down.” 11 Feb. 2009. New York Times: Online. <05 Dec. 200.
[4] Thompson, Ben. “What spoiled the party in Dubai?”27 Nov. 2009. BBC World News: Online. <06 Dec. 2009.
[5] Fenelon, K.G. The United Arab Emirates: An Economic and Social Survey. London and New York; Longman Group LTD, 1973. P.7.
[6] Fenelon, K.G. The United Arab Emirates: An Economic and Social Survey. London and New York; Longman Group LTD, 1973. P.7.
[8] “Building Towers, Cheating Workers: Exploitation of Migrant Construction Workers in the United Arab Emirates.” Human Rights Watch. Vol.18. No.8(E). Nov. 2006. <21 Nov. 2008. P.10.
[9] Binder, Leonard. Rebuilding Devastated Economies in the Middle East. New York: Center for Near Eastern Studies, UCLA, 2007. P. 44.
[15] Donnelly, Jack. Universal Human Rights: In Theory & Practice. United States of America: Cornell University Press, 2003. P.58.
[16] Ong, Aihwa. “The Gender and Labor Politics of Postmodernism.” Annual Reviews: Anthropology. Vol. 20. Pages: 297-309. 1991. <20.100191.001431?cookieSet=1>. 13 Dec. 2008. P.280.
[17] Ruggie, John. “Protect, Respect and Remedy: a Framework for Business and Human Rights.” Human Rights Council. Session 8. Agenda 3. 7 April. 2008. <13 Dec. 2008. P.3.
[18] Keane, David and McGeehan, Nicholas. “Enforcing Migrant Workers' Rights in the United Arab Emirates.” International Journal on Minority and Group Rights. Vol.15. No.1. Pages: 81. Brill (Martinus Nijhoff Publishers). 2008.<http://www.swetswise.com.ezproxy.uwindsor.ca/FullText....>. 13 Dec. 2008. P.84.
[19] Keane, David and McGeehan, Nicholas. “Enforcing Migrant Workers' Rights in the United Arab Emirates.” International Journal on Minority and Group Rights. Vol.15. No.1. Pages: 81. Brill (Martinus Nijhoff Publishers). 2008.<http://www.swetswise.com.ezproxy.uwindsor.ca/FullText....>. 13 Dec. 2008. P.91.
[20] Binder, Leonard. Rebuilding Devastated Economies in the Middle East. New York: Center for Near Eastern Studies, UCLA, 2007. P. 44.
[21] Keane, David and McGeehan, Nicholas. “Enforcing Migrant Workers' Rights in the United Arab Emirates.” International Journal on Minority and Group Rights. Vol.15. No.1. Pages: 81. Brill (Martinus Nijhoff Publishers). 2008.<http://www.swetswise.com.ezproxy.uwindsor.ca/FullText....>. 13 Dec. 2008. P.84.
[22]“Building Towers, Cheating Workers: Exploitation of Migrant Construction Workers in the United Arab Emirates.” Human Rights Watch. Vol.18. No.8(E). Nov. 2006. <21 Nov. 2008. P.66.
[23] “UAE: Draft Labor Law Violated International Standards.” Human Rights Watch: Online. 24. March. 2007.22 Nov. 2008.>
[31] Shaoul, Jean. “The plight of the UAE’s migrant workers: the flip side of a booming economy.” World Prout Assembly: Online. 9 Nov. 2007. <23 Nov. 2008.
[33] “Building Towers, Cheating Workers: Exploitation of Migrant Construction Workers in the United Arab Emirates.” Human Rights Watch. Vol.18. No.8(E). Nov. 2006. <21 Nov. 2008. P.66.
[36] “Federal Law No. 8 for 1980, On Regulation of Labor Relations The Determination of retentive Methods and Measures For the Protection of Workers From the Risks Work.” 30 August 2006, Vol. 142. No.32. 1982. <http://www.mol.gov.ae/Pages-EN/documents-en/rulelabour.>.13 Dec. 2008.
[38] Keane, David and McGeehan, Nicholas. “Enforcing Migrant Workers' Rights in the United Arab<>http://www.swetswise.com.ezproxy.uwindsor.ca/FullText....>. 13 Dec. 2008. P.93.
[39] Keane, David and McGeehan, Nicholas. “Enforcing Migrant Workers' Rights in the United Arab Emirates.” International Journal on Minority and Group Rights. Vol.15. No.1. Pages: 81. Brill (Martinus Nijhoff Publishers). 2008.<http://www.swetswise.com.ezproxy.uwindsor.ca/FullText....>. 13 Dec. 2008. P.92.
[40] Economist Intelligence Unit. “Country Report: UAE, Main Report.” 1 February 2005. 13 Dec. 2008.
[41] Donnelly, Jack. Universal Human Rights: In Theory & Practice. United States of America: Cornell University Press, 2003. P.204
[42] “Human Rights Watch interview with Indian social activist (identity withhold).” February 21, 2006. “Building Towers, Cheating Workers: Exploitation of Migrant Construction Workers in the United Arab Emirates.” Human Rights Watch. Vol.18. No.8(E). Nov. 2006. 22 Nov. 2008. P. 48.
[44] Shaoul, Jean. “The plight of the UAE’s migrant workers: the flip side of a booming economy.” World Prout Assembly: Online. 9 Nov. 2007. <23 Nov. 2008.
[48] “Building Towers, Cheating Workers: Exploitation of Migrant Construction Workers in the United Arab Emirates.” Human Rights Watch. Vol.18. No.8(E). Nov. 2006. <21 Nov. 2008. P.15.
[51] Binder, Leonard. Rebuilding Devastated Economies in the Middle East. New York: Center for Near Eastern Studies, UCLA, 2007. P. 44.
[52] “Top 20 Reasons Not To Move To Dubai.” YouTube Broadcast: Online. 11 Sept. 2007. <21 Nov. 2008.
[53] “UAE: Address Abuse of Migrant Workers.” Human Rights Watch: Online. 28 March. 2006. <22 Nov. 2008.
[54] “United Arab Emirates.” Country Reports on Human Rights Practices: 2006. Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, Labor. U.S. Department of State. 6 March. 2007. <24 Nov. 2008.
[55] “UAE – Amnesty International Report 2008.” Human Rights In United Arab Emirates. Report: 2008. Amnesty International: Online. <23 Nov. 2008.
[56] “Building Towers, Cheating Workers: Exploitation of Migrant Construction Workers in the United Arab Emirates.” Human Rights Watch. Vol.18. No.8(E). Nov. 2006. <21 Nov. 2008. P.11.
[57] Keane, David and McGeehan, Nicholas. “Enforcing Migrant Workers' Rights in the United Arab Emirates.” International Journal on Minority and Group Rights. Vol.15. No.1. Pages: 81. Brill (Martinus Nijhoff Publishers). 2008.<http://www.swetswise.com.ezproxy.uwindsor.ca/FullText....>. 13 Dec. 2008. P.89-90.
[58] Keane, David and McGeehan, Nicholas. “Enforcing Migrant Workers' Rights in the United Arab Emirates.” International Journal on Minority and Group Rights. Vol.15. No.1. Pages: 81. Brill (Martinus Nijhoff Publishers). 2008.<http://www.swetswise.com.ezproxy.uwindsor.ca/FullText....>. 13 Dec. 2008. P.89-90.
[59] Ruggie, John. “Protect, Respect and Remedy: a Framework for Business and Human Rights.” Human Rights Council. Session 8. Agenda 3. 7 April. 2008. <13 Dec. 2008. P.3.
[60] “UAE: Draft Labor Law Violated International Standards.” Human Rights Watch: Online. 24. March. 2007. <22 Nov. 2008.
[61] “United Arab Emirates.” Country Reports on Human Rights Practices: 2006. Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, Labor. U.S. Department of State. 6 March. 2007. <24 Nov. 2008.
[63] Donnelly Jack, Universal Human Rights, United States: Cornell University Press, 2003, p.129.
[64] “United Nations Member States.” Press Release: Org/1469. United Nations. 3 July. 2006. <15 Nov. 2008.
[65] “Building Towers, Cheating Workers: Exploitation of Migrant Construction Workers in the United Arab Emirates.” Human Rights Watch. Vol.18. No.8(E). Nov. 2006. <21 Nov. 2008. P.66.
[66] “Building Towers, Cheating Workers: Exploitation of Migrant Construction Workers in the United Arab Emirates.” Human Rights Watch. Vol.18. No.8(E). Nov. 2006. <21 Nov. 2008. P.66.
[67] “Charter-Based Mechanism for Human Rights Protection and Promotion.” The United Nations Human Rights System. Human Rights Education Associates. <22 October 2008.
[68] Donnelly, Jack. Universal Human Rights: In Theory & Practice. United States of America: Cornell University Press, 2003. P.145.
[69] Donnelly, Jack. Universal Human Rights: In Theory & Practice. United States of America: Cornell University Press, 2003. P.145-146.
[70] “Building Towers, Cheating Workers: Exploitation of Migrant Construction Workers in the United Arab Emirates.” Human Rights Watch. Vol.18. No.8(E). Nov. 2006. <21 Nov. 2008. P.68.
[71] “UAE: Workers Abused in Construction Boom.” Human Rights Watch: Online. 11 Nov. 2006. <22 Nov. 2008.
[72] Donnelly, Jack. Universal Human Rights: In Theory & Practice. United States of America: Cornell University Press, 2003. P.104.
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