Dubai: A 21st Century Metropolis?

Anne Jacob | Middle East Fellow

Image sourced from Rahul Kashyap via Unsplash

In a thrilling series of events, I found myself living in one of the world’s most garish cities – Dubai. Over the six months I spent there, the city would also reveal its less glamorous side.

On my first day in the heart of the Dubai International Financial Centre, I noticed that the receptionists, cleaners, and security guards were overwhelmingly Indian, Pakistani, and Bangladeshi. The lawyers, bankers, and consultants on the upper floors were largely Western expatriates. The social hierarchy was strikingly visible and impossible to ignore.

While Dubai is marketed as a global city of innovation and opportunity, many of the people responsible for building and maintaining that success are largely absent from the conversations about its future.

The Kafala System

The United Arab Emirates’ (UAE) economy is heavily reliant on migrant workers, with 90 per cent of its 9-million-plus population being foreign nationals. Most are low-wage and semi-skilled, hailing predominantly from South Asia and Africa.

Labour migration into the UAE is regulated by a private sponsorship system known as “Kafala”, which has existed for decades in Jordan, Lebanon and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states – Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE. The Kafala system is a set of laws and policies that tie a worker's legal residency and visa strictly to a single employer, giving the sponsor near total control over the worker's employment and ability to leave the country. In practice, this legalistic system is a recipe for exploitation.

Manipulation of the system regularly begins before workers arrive, with the private recruitment agencies that facilitate the migration process often deceptively promising skilled, well-paid job opportunities but instead delivering forced domestic labour. Under the Kafala system, workers typically cannot leave or change jobs prior to completion of their contract, before a certain time period, or without employer permission, leaving them vulnerable to exploitation. They are frequently left to live and work in extremely poor conditions, and exposed to wage theft, trafficking, and even severe physical abuse. One testimony explained “once we step in their homes, we are no longer human”. Those who do leave risk arrest and deportation for the crime of absconding.

Attempts for Reform

In 2021, the UAE introduced Federal Decree No.33 (the “UAE Labour Law”) to align with international standards, including regulating migrant worker recruitment, improving skills matching and training, removing requirements for employer permission to change jobs or leave the country, and expanding access to grievance and dispute resolution mechanisms.

While these reforms seem like a step in the right direction, labour exploitation nonetheless remains widespread due to weak implementation. On a cultural level, the perceived status of domestic workers, farmers, and labourers as servants, rather than employees, excludes them from protections. Moreover, it is in the pecuniary interests of those in power to uphold the status quo. For businesses, exploited workers lower operational expenses; for governments, cheap labour leads to lower-cost infrastructure projects that contribute to the megacity.

For example, while the UAE Labour Law explicitly prohibits forced labour, the government often considers instances of forced labour as regulatory infractions, issuing civil fines or suspending or revoking business licences, rather than initiating criminal prosecution. With the system set up to favour civil rather than criminal penalties, the legislation entrenches a lack of accountability and undermines its deterrent intent. A pattern of weak policy is evident more broadly across the Middle East, such as reforms in Lebanon to strengthen worker protections failing to pass Parliament multiple times due to opposition from recruitment agencies and political paralysis.

International Strategic Silence

While activists and human rights organisations consider most manifestations of the Kafala system as modern slavery, workers rarely receive protection from their home countries – their governments are unwilling to challenge a system that provides financial benefits through remitted wages.

Western governments are also hesitant to undermine relationships with states that use the Kafala system primarily due to geopolitical security interests and economic ties, notably from global reliance on the GCC’s oil and natural gas resources. The GCC are also vital military allies, buying significant Western defence technology and hosting crucial strategic military bases that project power across the Middle East and beyond, such as the Al Minhad Air Base in the UAE, which operates as the Australian Defence Force’s primary Middle Eastern headquarters. These alliances, and the regional security and lucrative trade they offer, often outweigh human rights concerns. 

That said, although foreign governments are often discouraged from confronting labour rights abuses in the Gulf due to these geopolitical and economic interests, they are not without influence. At the UAE’s Universal Periodic Review in 2023, the international community–including Australia–made several recommendations on protecting the rights of migrant workers, albeit somewhat fruitlessly. To add strength to recommendations and encourage reform, foreign countries can also use trade negotiations, diplomatic engagement, and consular intervention. Rather than severing economic ties and demanding wholesale abolition of the system, progressively linking bilateral trade agreements, energy investment partnerships, and foreign aid to measurable labour rights benchmarks would create incentives for Gulf States to transition towards more humane, contract-based labour frameworks.

As Gulf States seek to position themselves as global financial centres, the challenge will not be whether labour reforms are introduced, but whether they are meaningfully enforced. The future of the region's economic transformation may ultimately depend on how successfully it reconciles prosperity with the rights of those who helped build it.

Anne Jacob is an Australian-qualified lawyer with experience at a leading international law firm advising on complex commercial litigation, international arbitration and regulatory matters across the energy, oil and gas, and financial crime sectors. She spent six months working in the Middle East where she developed a keen interest in the region's rapid economic and infrastructure transformation, its growing influence in global energy markets, and the legal and policy challenges arising from labour migration.

Her principal areas of interest are public international law, human rights and international dispute resolution. She studied international human rights law at the University of Copenhagen and currently volunteers with legal counsel at Amnesty International Australia. She has contributed to several public interest matters supporting refugees and self-represented litigants.

Through this fellowship, Anne hopes to explore Australia's engagement with the Middle East and make complex legal and policy issues accessible to broader audiences.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of Young Australians in International Affairs. AI tools were used by this author for grammar checks and idea refinement, but all content is original, and no plagiarism has been used in the preparation of this article.