Dubai Dreams

All this was playing in the back drop of his mind while travelling from the Airport with Najeeb to the staff quarters; the struggle in Delhi: his education which had brought him to Dubai, and the unpaid bank loan which always lingered in his mind.

After arriving in the residential area, he was led into a room in the staff accommodation in Al Quoz. It was a staff quarter building for the people working at the construction company. The four-storied building has more than 50 rooms. As he entered a huge corridor, people spoke in Hindi. Salaam felt relaxed. But, to his surprise, he was led into a room where nine people were sleeping in cluster beds.

“It looked like the same old hostel of Aligarh. The beds were arranged haphazardly, the clothes were hanging on a linen rope; there was no order in the room, as if all people inside were working in a mill and low paid workers,” Saleem recalls.

This was the first shock he got on the first day in Dubai. Although from a lower middle class family, Saleem was used to live in his own room in Kashmir. Here he had to share it with the nine other people. This was not something for which he had come to Dubai. And it was among many other surprises he got.

Those who build the buildings, like most immigrant labor force, live and work in extremely testing conditions. When the 2008-2009 economic crises took place, it temporarily slowed down the Dubai construction boom. Some companies went out of business, leaving most of their workers jobless. Workers complained that these defunct companies owed them money, something which was not known to Saleem.

Next day, he went to the office where he was supposed to work. To his surprise, he found out from the HR of the company that he had been employed as an assistant which was not something for which he had come to Dubai. His letter of appointment, which he received from the agent in Srinagar, mentioned something else.

He complained but no one listened. The company then told him if wants to work, he had to do the job, otherwise he was free to go back to Kashmir. He kept mum. Anger and frustration built up inside him but there was nothing he could do. He thought of joining the company till he found another, better job. And he decided to stay back. He had been cheated by the agent in Srinagar.

“I had two choices; either to come back or stay. Coming back meant living in abject poverty, something I was not ready for,” he says. A normal day in Dubai involved getting up early in the morning for his shift. He used to watch TV in the common room, eat some food, normally rice and curry, and maybe read. The time used to pass like that, until one day when he was totally fed up and he decided to leave the company and search for another job.

It soon dawned on Saleem that his dreams were shattered. He couldn’t pay back his loan and then there was no place to live in Dubai. A Bengali man who had become his friend provided him accommodation. After a month, he got job in food proceeding unit and started every thing from scratch.

Saleem says he would have worked for the same company, Jams HR Solutions, for less salary but it was the treatment meted out to the workers because of which he left the job. At one time, the workers seized the construction site to protest against the ill-treatment meted out to them by the company.

Jams HR Solutions had employed Egyptian security guards who would often ill-treat employees that it led to a confrontation on the New Year’s Eve in 2011. The workers were beaten up by the security guards which enraged the 2,000 residents of the camp. The workers attacked the security guards and started destroying company property.

“It was justified because the anger was boiling against the company and security officials for a long time. Despite our complaints, the company never listened to us,” Saleem says. The melee spilled over into the construction sites where most camp residents work and morning workers occupied the construction sites to protest late payment of wages and the squalid living conditions at the camp.

Saleem left the job after that and joined another place, “There are many uneducated people who leave Kashmir in search of better in jobs in Dubai and they get cheated by the agents in Srinagar who promise them moon. But once you arrive in Dubai, you become like those lakhs of faceless and nameless workers who are behind the success of Dubai.”

There are hundreds of unregistered consultation agencies in Kashmir who send well-qualified people from Kashmir to Dubai against a huge sum of money. Many of them end up in small bunker-like construction companies like Saleem and there is no one to assure them their safety and fight for their rights.