“Habibi, don’t come to Dubai”: Investigating Modern Day Slavery in the UAE

PHOTO: Dubai Frame, Ahmed Aldaie on Unsplash

From Dubai Bling to Dubai Chocolate, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) has dominated entertainment media and tourism since the discovery of oil in the late 1960s, launching them as a key player in the global trade hierarchy due to soft power influences. 

UAE’s most successful city, Dubai, is gold, glitter and glamour. It houses the world’s tallest building, the largest shopping center, fastest police car and is the number one TripAdvisor travel destination. 

However, the cost of the UAE’s success is paid for in blood. The UAE’s ‘elite’ status is one upheld by modern slavery systems under the guise of cheap labour. For as tall as the buildings are, equally as long are the shadows they cast; ones of oppressiveness, human rights abuses and exploitation. 

The theory of modern-day slavery

Across the 300 years of the transatlantic slave trade, 12.5 million people were enslaved within the Americas. In the present day, there are 40.3 million people enslaved around the world, with 132,000 in the UAE alone.

The Australian Human Rights Institute defines modern day slavery by a range of practices that include: trafficking in persons, slavery, servitude, forced marriage, forced labour, forced marriage and debt bondage. 

As such, it is clear slavery has not only survived the 1963 abolishment of slavery in the UAE, but has been reborn under a new name: the Kafala system. 

On the surface, the Kafala appears to resolve the demand-supply crisis of the job market, exporting citizens of nations with limited job markets to the UAE, in order to fill a labour shortage. However, a deeper dive reveals a sinister reality, of a job-sponsorship system binding migrant workers to employers through entrapment and false promises. 

Internal systems of slavery

The Burj ‘Kafala‘

Formed in the 1950s to accommodate the industrial rise of Gulf nations, the Kafala, derived from the Arabic word for sponsor, ‘kafeel’, meaning to care for, devolved from a migrant work opportunity to a modern day slavery system. 

The system requires each worker to be sponsored by a citizen of the host country, who is responsible for the worker’s legal status and visa, of which they can terminate at their whim, forcing the immediate deportation of the worker. 

Transforming human beings into human commodities, or ‘human capital’, the sponsorship system gives private companies in most Arab Gulf countries near complete control over migrant workers’ employment and immigration status. 

Due to a desire for cheaper labour, the system preferred non-Arab workers after the oil boom in the 1970s; often those with language and understanding barriers, creating conditions ripe for exploitation, with darker skinned African and South Asian workers suffering significantly more than other workers. 

Though initially created to supply cheap, plentiful labor in an era of booming economic growth to drive development, the system’s lack of regulations and protections for migrant workers results in low wages, poor working conditions and employee abuses.

According to the Council of Foreign Relations, these include: 

• Restriction from the outside world

Domestic workers are prevented from escaping the system or returning to their homes, as Kafeels regularly confiscate passports, visas and phones, trapping them in overcrowded dorms. These dorms have a high rate of contracted illnesses, and as non-nationals need private healthcare, diseases often go untreated. 

• Forced Labour

By creating complicated contracts sometimes in languages they don’t understand, employers use contract substitution to force workers into accepting poor wages. 

• Debt Abuse

Entry into the Kafala system is through an unregulated recruitment industry, with some of the most abusive practices requiring workers to pay fees and incur debt in order to travel abroad for work that is not repaid, leaving them in a permanent power imbalance with the Kafeel; a power dynamic that resembles that of slavery.

• Visa Abuse

As workers’ visas are linked and only sponsors can renew or terminate them, employers have authority over workers’ legal statuses, creating a power imbalance. Workers depend on sponsors to remain in the country legally because sponsors can invalidate their status for any reason and if the employee leaves the workplace without permission, either the worker’s legal status is terminated, or they are potentially imprisoned or deported. 

PHOTO: Construction Workers in Burj Dubai, Imre Solt on Wikimedia Commons

Real People, Real Pain

The Kafala reportedly contributed to the deaths of thousands of migrant workers over the past decade in the Gulf, due to extreme working conditions, high stress and suicide rates and spread of diseases from poor living conditions, 

In the UAE, UK Media outlet, ‘The Standard’, tells the story of a Pakistani man, forced to endure 12+ hours of work daily and live in crowded conditions, or else risk being removed by the company and deported. 

Hassan, a construction worker, has been left to starve in a dusty labour camp after being made redundant along with 98 other co-workers, living in cramped quarters on metal beds with no food to cook, let alone afford his medication with no income. 

Junaid Ansari arrived in Dubai to work as a house-helper, but upon arrival was forced into a factory instead, receiving physical, verbal and financial abuse if he spoke out about conditions or being deceived.  

It is evident that this modern day slavery system is not unlike slavery of the 19th century, except instead of physical chains, there are institutional ones. 

The wealth divide.

“If you are rich, it is heaven”

This is the sentiment of the young Pakistani man, but it is one reflected across the wealthy elites of Dubai, where wealth structures societal order and the city alike. 

As the playground of the rich and famous, Dubai’s wealth-building market policies, such as low taxes, has produced an urban city unlike any other; one divided sharply between affluent enclaves of wealth, and spaces for migrant workers in the shadows of the rich. 

This is not a theoretical divide, but an urban-geographical one, where ‘Old Dubai‘ is characterised by labour camps and poor infrastructure, whereas ‘New Dubai‘ houses the elite and the institutions needed for their lifestyles of wealth. 

Dubai can be seen to manufacture inequality through segmentation, concentrating migrant workers in the outskirts of the city rather than ‘mixing classes’, reinforced by housing and socialising patterns such as the wealthy having gated communities and exclusive residential districts. 

On the ground, this means that there is minimal interaction between the ‘top’ and ‘bottom’ class groups, enabling the affluent to view migrant workers withsuspicion and a threat to the aesthetics of the lives they have ‘built’. 

A white woman who has lived in Dubai for two decades states she “has a significantly better standard of living”, in a stark lifestyle contrast to the Indian helper she had hired. This system enables luxury to remain a separate society of its own, where migrant labour supports domestic service and other sectors to sustain the lifestyle of wealthier residents, yet the workers themselves remain structurally excluded from the privileges they help produce. 

Workers in Dubai exist as service providers, but not necessarily as equal participants in urban life. As such, the Kafala is not just a system of labour, but one upholding the societal and spatial separation of the wealthy. 

PHOTO: A group of people standing on top of a roof in the UAE, Ahmad Bader on Unsplash

Gendered Exploitation

The victims facing the highest levels of oppression under the Kafala system are the estimated 1.6 million migrant women, mainly those who come from Africa and South Asia. In the Gulf, female workers are especially vulnerable due to their domestic jobs in private homes, such as cleaners, housekeepers and nannies, where the work is outside of local labor regulations. 
The Human Rights Watch interviewed 99 women working in Dubai, 10 of whom were not in possession of their passports, and many are yet to receive over a year’s worth of wages, facing all forms of abuse.

PHOTO: Tim Umphreys on Unsplash

External Systems of Slavery

Following the gold brick road: UAE’s exploitation of Sudan with the RSF

The UAE’s involvement in external conflicts for private benefit is not a matter of mere speculation. With multiple gold refineries and thousands of precious stones dealers, the UAE  remains the greatest beneficiary of the gold trade which funds the ongoing war in Sudan. 

Specifically, Dubai’s position as one of the main hubs for the global gold trade means that it benefits from the exploitative labour conditions that make that trade possible; conflict, coercion, and labour exploitation. 

Crucially, the most notable backer of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) has been the UAE. Artisanal and small gold mining (ASGM) make up the majority of Sudan’s gold production that feeds Dubai’s refineries, enabling them to benefit from the cheap and dangerous labour. As Sudan’s gold mines have limited input costs, use cheap manual labour and create a highly mobile product, Abu Dhabi is easily able to exploit and smuggle the metal across borders. 

This perpetuates the modern slavery of gold in Sudan, where miners work long hours in harsh conditions with high chances of injury and death, a vulnerability raised by the fact that their income is dependent on how much gold they extract in addition to the 10.70 AUD they make (compared to the employers who get a third of the profits). 

This connection between this external slavery system in Sudan, and internal slavery system of the Kafala is critical, as both systems are structurally similar and act as parallels in explaining the UAE’s business model (focusing on cheap labour and upholding wealth above all else).  Inside the UAE, the Kafala ties workers to employers, limits mobility, and creates extreme dependence. In Sudan, gold mining and wartime extraction require miners to face dangerous conditions, long hours, and severe insecurity while elites and armed actors capture the profits.

The majority of exported gold from Sudan through RSF zones has landed in the UAE, argued to be the dominant destination for illicit gold flows from across Africa, a trade not only continued, but supported by the war. 

In 2018, the UAE had imported 99.2% of the country’s gold exports from Sudan through the RSF while RSF militiamen fought in Yemen and Libya on their behalf. In exchange, the UAE is reported to have supplied drones, anti-aircraft missiles, mortars and ammunition to sustain the RSF’s war effort at the cost of human lives. Miners and communities affected by the effort sustain a lucrative gold trade, but their labour is absorbed into a market that rewards external actors.

This mirrors the UAE’s domestic model, where migrant workers also bear the burden of dangerous and low-paid labour so that wealthier actors can enjoy comfort, security, and accumulation. 

In this light, Sudan’s gold war and Dubai’s migrant-labour economy are connected in a wider political economy of wealth production through labour abuse, where the UAE profits from multiple slavery systems, each reinforcing the other.

PHOTO: US Secretary Marco Rubio meets with Egyptian Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty, Saudi Foreign Minister Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud and UAE Deputy Prime Minister Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan, US Department of State on Wikimedia Commons

Reforming the Kafala System

Reform is possible, but the main obstacle is the Kafala’s embeddedment in the UAE’s economic model, social hierarchy and international profit networks. Its longevity is driven by the same forces that sustain the class divide and the country’s reliance on migrant labour. 

Reforming the system requires the structural decoupling of migrant workers’ residency from employer sponsorship, hence eliminating the principal mechanism of coercive control. 

By enforcing standardised employment contracts, higher minimum wages, meaningful penalties for non-compliance and ensuring the state manages immigration, the Kafala system can be vastly rectified to reduce exploitation. 

In the end, it is evident that although Dubai’s glamour may blind the world, no sparkle can wash the blood of slavery from its foundations.

PHOTO: Stefano Vigorelli on Wikimedia Commons