Dubai ticking time bomb
Thanks to my man Tom, formerly of Zemalek-Cairo fame, soon to be of Abu Dhabi fame, for providing these links and prompting this blogpost.A very interesting viewpoint aka. leftist/socialist take on the phenomenon that is Dubai.
While the Dubai piece is certainly far from unbiased, and it does lampoon Sheikh Maktoum's gigantic ambitions fairly cleverly, it does also bring up some very interesting points about Dubai's history, srategy, laws and class society.
Historically, the article talks a great deal about Dubai's very humble beginnings, and how, interestingly, it has used many underworld links to ensure the security that it currently enjoys.
Dubai now enjoys high marks from Washington as a partner in the War on Terror and, in particular, as a base for spying on Iran; [26] but it is probable that al-Maktoum, like the other Emirati rulers, still keeps a channel open to radical Islamists. If al-Qaeda so desired, for example, it could presumably turn the Burj Al-Arab and Dubai’s other soaring landmarks into so many towering infernos. Yet so far Dubai is one of the few cities in the region to have entirely avoided car-bombings and attacks on Western tourists: eloquent testament, one might suppose, to the city-state’s continuing role as a money laundry and upscale hideout, like Tangiers in the 1940s or Macao in the 1960s. Dubai’s burgeoning black economy is its insurance policy against the car-bombers and airplane hijackers.
The article also points out how, rather obviously, how much the Gulf economies are reliant on positive fluctuations in the oil price, and how these fluctuations come about:
Every time insurgents blow up a pipeline in the Niger Delta, a martyr drives his truck bomb into a Riyadh housing complex, or Washington and Tel Aviv rattle their sabres at Tehran, the price of oil (and thus Dubai’s ultimate income) increases by some increment of anxiety in the all-important futures market. The Gulf economies, in other words, are now capitalized not just on oil production, but also on the fear of its disruption.
The article also makes a very interesting point of the current guest worker situation, that is of course applicable to all the other Gulf states (though not quite so much as Dubai with its ridiculously tiny single-digit local population).
The unruly voice of labour echoes louder in the deserts of the uae than it might elsewhere. At the end of the day, Dubai is capitalized just as much on cheap labour as it is on expensive oil, and the Maktoums, like their cousins in the other emirates, are exquisitely aware that they reign over a kingdom built on the backs of a South Asian workforce.
The question on everyone's lips of course, is how sustainable this strategy is exactly. Perhaps because the article was published in October of 2006, it fails to mention the impact that the falling value of the US Dollar is currently having on worker morale in the Gulf. If we look simply at the state of the US economy, and the concurrently nosediving interest rates (down 0.75 percentage points last month, and another 0.5 a week later), the picture for the US currency sure looks bleak indeed. Which also means that the outlook for those of us earning Bahraini Dinar, Saudi Rial, Emirati Dirham, or any of the other Gulf currencies pegged to the USD is similarly not good. Particularly for those that are earning these wages in ridiculously tiny amounts, all on the premise of being able to send some home to South/South-East Asia. Now when these currencies begin to depreciate at a great rate to the Indian Rupee and other South/South-East Asian currencies, the trouble begins. Working conditions have not improved, wages have not appreciated in nominal terms and are depreciating now when stacked up in real terms against the wages they are meant to supplicate in the workers' home countries. Combine this with the already simmering discontent of being treated like slaves with no rights to mobilisation, let alone collective bargaining, and you really have a problem. It does indeed seem that, at least in this respect, the Gulf is a ticking time bomb. Food for thought, and we thought sectarian unrest or a strike against Iran were the problems, this seems to be the least of our worries...
Labels: bahrain, dubai, politics, world happenings
posted by LX @ 8:42 AM
Comments: 6
