Dubai slump strands Asians

UNDER an unforgiving sun, Asian workers stir giant pots of rice, their only food, in a barren patch of desert 60 miles from a gleaming Dubai skyline built over decades by migrant labour.

Abandoned by employers who left the United Arab Emirates after the Dubai economy soured, the men cannot afford to stay, but they also cannot leave. They have not been paid for months and their passports were confiscated long ago.

These workers, and thousands like them stranded in Dubai and neighbouring emirate Sharjah, are the human collateral damage of the world economic crisis.

"We're stuck here while our families in India face a dark future with no money. I don't have a single fils (penny)," said Mohan, a worker whose employer, a labour supply company, fled the UAE two months ago.

The UAE transformed itself at breakneck speed from a small Gulf Arab fishing and trade centre into a regional business and tourism hub on the back of cheap foreign labour.

But now, as companies contract or fold all together, some employers are slipping out of the country, leaving work camps filled with stranded migrants.

The gas and electricity have now been cut to Mohan's work camp in Sharjah, which houses 350 technicians and drivers. The men have no air conditioning - critical in a country where summer temperatures hit 47C.

Stories like those of the Sharjah camp are growing familiar, said Saher Shaikh, 33, a Pakistani who runs charity efforts to provide for the workers. "They are promised pay, and told to keep working," she said. "But the management flees, work stops, and their wages never come."

The UAE has faced criticism from rights groups who say companies go unpunished as they flout laws to ensure workers are paid and their papers not withheld. Others say the government's task is daunting because of the speed at which some companies pulled up stakes.

The workers in the Sharjah camp say they have not been paid monthly wages of about 800 dirhams (140) in six months to a year. Stuck in Sharjah, the men wait, crammed into camps of crumbling housing blocks. A trail of sewage oozes between buildings, its suffocating stench spreading nausea and fever among the occupants.

The ministry of labour, which did not reply to requests for comment, has been slowly answering workers' calls for help: It sent home around 1,500 labourers in June and paid their wages.

But months have passed as Mohan and his co-workers in Sharjah wait for help from the ministry and the Indian embassy, who have recovered their passports and promised to send them home.

Picking through the litter-strewn Sharjah camp, Shaikh listens as men flock around her to vent their frustrations, some holding back tears. "We just sit and sleep, and have too much time to worry. We just want to go back to India," one man in the crowd pleads.

Many workers took loans of 700-1,400 to pay recruitment agencies to bring them to the UAE, even though the law here bans the practice.

In boom times, labourers quickly paid back loans. Now, the cranes and drills lie idle and the men say their families are suffering. "My family is hungry," Mohan said. "I had two kids trying to get a degree, and now what? There is no money."

Ms Shaikh blamed the companies for the workers' plight.

"They could have afforded to send the men home fairly. Instead they've left them here."