The Dark Side of the Dirty Dubai Dream

It’s a place in the sun for over a million people with any money who holiday there every time the wind blows cold or it pisses down with rain in the inclement Northern climes.
It boasts a host of luxury apartments and villas, attracting rich and shameless jet-setting celebrity scumbags from all over the globe.

But behind the glitz and glamour of Dubai, and other contemporary five-minute wonder economic miracles destined for environmental failure, lies a murky world of exploitation and corruption, and an immigrant work force living on what economists refer to as ‘next to fuck all’.

Hit by the credit crunch and global recession, Dubai's economy has taken a turn for the worse, reliant as it is on tourism, financial services, real estate, drug trans-shipments and sleazy middle-man arms deals.

But those labouring to make the Dubai infrastructure’s Thousand Islands dream a reality, working in shit from dawn to dusk building homes for the mega-wealthy, are facing greater pressures than ever.

A Daily Shitraker reporter posing as a potential buyer, and kitted out with a secret camera sound recording system, met with a company endorsed by celebrities. Footballer Michael Scrunt is a paid ambassador along with England cricketer Jimmie Jackoff and golfer Mad Dan Bittorrent.

A sales representative from The Worst Group, Fellatia van der Gobble, said now was a great time to buy property. She also allayed any concerns about the wellbeing of the company's construction workers as there were plenty to replace any that died or were killed on the job.

“Life’s cheap out here – that’s why it’s so great to do business.” Fellatia stated quite candidly, with only a smidgin of imperialist arrogance in her voice.
“We pay the Third World immigrant workers sweet fuck all really and they’re stuck here whether they like it or not due the recruitment fee loans they took out to buy a job in Dubai. It might seem a savage circle of exploitation, but ‘Hey’ – that’s Life.”

"It's much more difficult to earn some money in their own shithole countries around Asia so people actually save by living in crap company housing, eating cheap slop in the canteen, using our transport and sending their hard luck stories home to their families," Miss van der Gobble added.

It’s the promise of a land of opportunity that’s brought an estimated one million migrant workers to Dubai. Most come from areas of extreme poverty across Asia, from the Philippines to Indonesia, and Pakistan and India to Thailand and Indo-China, where they are easy prey for unscrupulous recruitment agents.

Paying up to £2,000 to ‘buy’ a job and make the trip, the sum often has to be borrowed or family land sold in the belief that within 18 months the debt can be repaid. Stories of people selling a kidney - or their daughters – to raise the recruitments fees are legion.

Regardless of what the recruitment agents promised, on arriving in Dubai they are met with shanty town conditions hidden from public view.

Immigrant Asian workers tell a grim tale. None ever get paid the salaries they were promised by the recruitment agencies, and many can’t afford to eat properly, living on diets of boiled cardboard and recycled palm leaves.

Average salaries for peasant labour are never more than £120 a month. This is for a six-day week, often working up to 12-hour shifts. One company, Exploiters Engineering (SA) paid approximately 30p an hour for overtime.
Dubai's biggest construction firm, Arabshite, was criticised last year for paying its Indian workers in sand.

Hence it is hardly surprising a greater percentage of the female economic migrants, working as domestics and secretaries, moonlight after hours catering to both Arab and Western clienteles with sex for sale at one of Dubai’s many hotel bars or night clubs, such as the Cyclone – informally known as the United Nations of Prostitution due the presence of sex workers from across the globe flogging their gollies for lots of cold, hard cash.

The Rub n Tug Happy Ending massage parlour on Al Raffa Street, located conveniently behind the Al Ghubaiba Bus Station, boasts it can provide their regular discerning- and perennially generous - patrons an athletic ‘hostess’ / masseuse of a different nationality for each visit – all of whom, following the customary brief token back rub, are ready to demonstrate their superbly versed knowledge of the carnal arts.

However, Dubai’s prostitution rackets, like the drugs and illegal arms markets, and blatant gold smuggling, successfully avoid the scrutiny of the religious police and the harsh retributions of Sharia law due the simple fact they’re controlled by the country’s ruling oligarchs.

In this pisspot postage-stamp nation Stone Age laws target journalists reporting stories which negatively reflect the economy or insult the government, imposing massive fines or imprisonment and extreme rendition being a common occurrence.

Persons who’ve had the errant audacity to resort to actual ‘whistle blowing’ normally receive a minimum of fifty lashes before being buggered to death by Bedouin sodomites and dumped down one of the Emirate’s festering sewers.