Many of the better-educated expatriates end up in managerial positions in large companies and do well for themselves. The majority, however, end up doing manual labour. All expatriates working in the Gulf require local sponsors in order to obtain work visas. Changing sponsors is a difficult and expensive task, when it is permitted at all. This practice has ensured that workers remain tied to one company, come what may. Employers have often abused the law (and the very weak labour inspection regime) by not paying workers their meager wages – just $150 per month in some cases – for months on end. Workers, who usually support families in their home countries, are then put into a desperate situation. In many cases, these workers have taken large loans to pay off recruiters in their home countries for a chance to work in the Gulf, imagining that they will make lots of money and retire in relative wealth. Little wonder, then, that some of them are trying to get killed to get back some money for their families.

Since many construction companies are owned by powerful people, including members of the royal families, the names of delinquent companies are often not printed in the press, if protests are reported at all. The government is often in cahoots with these companies. Official daily maximum temperatures in the summer seldom go beyond about 46°C, because outdoor work is prohibited when temperatures rise about 50°C. For the first time, a ban on outdoor work in July and August between 12:30 and 4:30 PM was announced last year in the UAE, but there weren't enough labour inspectors to properly enforce it (80 in a country with at least 2 million foreign workers). Companies in violation of labour laws are seldom given more than a slap on the wrist. They are sometimes banned from getting visas for new workers, but the owners are never personally punished for their crimes.

In the UAE, a minor turning point came last year when unpaid workers blocked Dubai’s main traffic artery, causing 50km of gridlock. Rather than deport them, the relatively progressive labour minister met with the workers and promised that they would be paid. The company was named and shamed in the press the next day, and was publicly told to pay up. The authorities have since set up a phone hotline for labour complaints and distributed a limited number of leaflets informing workers about their rights. Press reports about protests have also become more frequent, although very few of the 500 protests in the country last year actually received any attention at all.

It has thus far been illegal for workers to organize or employ collective bargaining in order to improve their conditions, and this is at the heart of the problem. While there are signs that this might change, it remains to be seen whether any new laws will be meaningful. In Qatar, where trade unions are legal, none have been formed (as of a few months ago). Some limited employee associations are legal in the UAE, but a company must have 50 national employees to qualify – effectively limiting these associations to well-paid banking and insurance sectors where the government forces companies to hire nationals, and where there is little need for association in the first place. As a result, workers have no other means of voicing discontent, and the government prefers not to be embarassed by public protests.

So far, any movement towards improving worker rights seems to be driven by external pressure, rather than any genuine internal motivation. On one hand, awareness is raised by human rights agencies issuing complaints, with additional pressure exerted by the US government during recent free trade talks. On the other, Dubai's government in particular is eager to sell itself as modern and Westernized in order to attract tourists and wealthy Western residents, compelling it to outlaw some of the more visible abuses. For a decade now, workers in the emirate have been transported on buses rather than packed onto flatbed/pickup trucks like cattle. However, workers throughout the Gulf are still largely confined to squalid labour camps on the outskirts of cities, where they are invisible to the general populace. Some categories of low-paid workers live in houses where as many as 12 people share a room in order to save on rent, but they risk being caught by the police and deported for overcrowding. Indeed, ‘bachelors’ – the euphemism for males whose families remain abroad due to government regulations forbidding those earning less than a certain salary from sponsoring family members' visas – are not supposed to live in large areas of Gulf cities. Municipalities have designated these areas as being exclusively for ‘families’ - anyone but single men earning low wages. Much of this discrimination seems unlikely to vanish soon, as seen in a recent decision in Sharjah to prevent members of the working class from using public parks.

Perhaps the scale of violent protests will have to increase before the authorities enact significant reform. Since workers are non-citizens and cheap labour is vital to the economy, they have so far been doing as little as they have felt they can get away with in terms of improving rights.